MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


“NANOOK OF THE NORTH” 


BY 
ROBERT J. FLAHERTY 


IN COLLABORATION WITH 
FRANCES HUBBARD FLAHERTY 





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NANOOK THE BEAR 


MY 
ESKIMO FRIENDS 


“NANOOK OF THE NORTH” 


BY 
ROBERT J. FLAHERTY, F. R.G. S. 


IN COLLABORATION WITH 


FRANCES HUBBARD FLAHERTY 





ILLUSTRATED WITH 


PHOTOGRAVURES AND COLOR PLATES 
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR 


HALFTONE DRAWINGS BY 
ESKIMO ARTISTS AND MAPS 


GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
1924 











i 


COPYRIGHT, 1922, 1923, 1924, BY 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 
THE COUNTRY LIFE pia GARDEN CITY, N. y. 
First Edition 


THEGETIY CENTER 
LIBRARY 


TO 
MY FATHER 





CONTENTS 


PART I 

THE Discovery AND EXPLORATION OF THE BELCHER 

IsLANDS . ; I 

PART II 

BMOMEBPON WETALLTOK S ISLAND .-.  . =. . 49 
PART III 

THE ExPLoRATION OF NorRTHERN UNGAVA Seen 
PART IV 


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COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONS 


Nanook the Bear . . . . . .. .. .. Frontispiece 
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Memes tiarpooner |. 9) ke 146 
HALFTONES 
Off from the Wintering Base on a Sledge Trip . . 26 
Seeman. Walris 90° 8) 5 7). oe a 4 
MP) ee a ae a 66 
eeeremanncing scenes. 5 9. 9... ke Lt ge 
Beemees nook (the bear)... wa se 30 


The Artist and His Signature—Wetalltok. . . . 154 


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LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES 


FACING PAGE 


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MAPS 
A Detail Map of Two Routes followed by Mr. Flaherty 
Hudson Bay and the Fictionary Belcher Islands . 
Hudson Bay and the Real Belcher Islands 
Route of the Schooner Laddie . 
Map of the Belcher Islands . 
A Seventeenth Century Map of Hudson Bay. 


PAGE 


10 
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55 





PA Ina 


THE DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION 
OF THE BELCHER ISLANDS 





MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


HE Government of Canada, in 1910, decided to con- 

struct a railway from the wheatfields of the west to 

the west coast of Hudson Bay in order to provide an 
outlet for the shipment of wheat through Hudson Bay and 
Hudson Strait to Europe. Sir William Mackenzie, whose 
railway, the Canadian Northern, was then in the initial stages 
of its construction across the continent, decided to investi- 
gate the seaboard of Hudson Bay for iron ore. He reasoned 
that if the shipment of wheat could be successfully carried 
out, iron ore as well could be shipped to the great markets 
of the world. 

Sir William, in August, 1910, commissioned the writer to 
undertake an exploration of the Nastapoka Islands, outlying 
the east coast of Hudson Bay. Upon certain islands of the 
group, iron ore was reported to occur. 

Through the great hinterland of Quebec and Ontario my 
father! had carried on, from the time that I was a boy, ex- 
tensive explorations for iron ore. With his engineers and 
prospectors I grew up on explorations whose range, east and 
west, was more than a thousand miles. Long journeys some 
of them seemed to be then—through the courses of un- 


1Robert H. Flaherty, who during his lifetime was the foremost figure in the iron ore 
exploration of Canada. 


I 


2 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


mapped lakes and streams, over the height of land and on 
halfway down the big tumbling rivers whose ends are on 
Hudson Bay. Hudson Bay was mysterious country. The 
grizzled old fur traders and the fur brigades of strange In- 
dians, curiously garbed, with hair shoulder-long, whom we 
sometimes ran into, seemed to be people of another world. 

Crew and outfit were modest enough. Crundell, a young 
Englishman, for the first stage of the journey was my sole 
companion. A seventeen-foot “Chestnut,” beans, bacon, 
bannock, dried fruit, and tea, the usual grub supply of north- 
country men, a few simple instruments, and a carbine Win- 
chester, comprised the outfit. 

We jumped off for the North from a tiny settlement out- 
lying the northern Ontario frontier, Ground Hog by name, 
whose only reason for being was that it was a temporary 
rail end pending the bridging by the Grand Trunk Pacific 
of the Ground Hog River, upon the stump-scarred banks of 
which it stood. 

Down the silent, sombrely forested courses of the little 
Ground Hog, into the big Mattagami, and on into the smooth, 
swift, mile-wide mirror of the Moose was only five days’ 
travel, for though the distance was nearly two hundred 
miles, the rivers were high and flowing strong. 

The rugged granites over which the Mattagami breaks, 
long “‘saults,” smoking falls, and canyon-slots through the 
hills, give way about halfway down to a vast muskeg plain 
which extends for the remainder of the river courses to the _ 
sea—a great desolate waste, treeless save along the margins 
of lakes and streams. Unbrokenly level, in Devonian times, 
as the fossils in the limestone of its underlying formation 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS 0 


show, it was the floor of the now distant sea. Through it 
the Mattagami, a deep groove, loops and winds. 

Wide scars of brilée, chafing tangles of tree trunks barked 
and bleached by the weather, alternated with live forests of 
sombre fir, silver birches, and long-stemmed, sea-green 
groves of poplar. Huge portions of it, undermined by the 
icefields of break-up time in spring and by the floods of high- 
water season, lay avalanched in chaos on the lower slopes. 
Trunks, branches, and foliage of the wreckage swayed like 
dead heads at midstream. 

There was little wild life. The raucous cries of wheeling 
gulls, the “quawk, quawk” of wood duck, were infrequent 
enough to be startling. Even in the forest places, the cawing 
of some “Whisky Johnny” for bitsof bannock and bacon 
rind, and the forlorn cries of “Poor Canada”’ were the only 
sounds. Of natives we saw only signs—gaunt tepee frames, 
sleeping patches of weather-rusted boughs, and here and 
there poles that, as they inclined upstream or down, pointed 
out the travellers’ direction; or message sticks bearing scrolls 
of birch bark covered with charcoal writing in the mission- 
ary’s syllabic Cree. 

The Moose begins, impressively large, where the Mis- 
sanabe from the west and the Mattagami meet. By night- 
fall it broadened to three miles. The forests of either shore 
gave way to dreary wastes of muskeg and to spectres of 
solitary wind-shapen trees. Seaward were long leaden lanes 
and smoky haze and the mirage of islands in the sky. 

On the river’s last large island, we reached the great fur 
stronghold of the North, two and a half centuries old, Moose 
Factory—an enchanting panorama enchantingly unwinding 


4 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


—tepees, overturned canoes, green cultivated fields, mea- 
dows, hayricks, grazing cattle, prim cottages and rough- 
hewn cabins, a little old church with a leaning red tower, 
and in formal array, red-roofed, weather-worn post buildings. 

A few curious half-breeds and their wives stood at the 
edge of the bank as we climbed from the landing. The men 
slouched, hands in pockets, gazed intently, and the women, 
in the abashed manner of the country, peered from the hooded 
depths of their plaid shawls. In the background a group of 
Indian women and their children lingered furtively. Dogs 
innumerable, enervated by the warmth of sun, lay sprawled 
on the green—short-haired Indian curs, and here and there a 
splendid husky from the barrens of the Eskimos far north- 
ward. On the green stood an elaborately staged flagpole 
flanked by two old bronze field guns; adjacent, the trade 
shop, over its entrance the Company’s emblazoned coat of 
arms; and deep-set from the green an old three-storied fur 
warehouse, alongside of it the forge of the armourer and the 
boatyards of the shipwrights and carpenters; and facing 
them all the master’s white red-roofed mansion with dormer 
windows and a deep encircling veranda. 

With the post officers—they wore informal tweeds and 
white collars—we dined in the messroom of the mansion, 
where a moccasined Indian served us from a sideboard array 
of old silver plate. Travel on the river, the highor low water, 
and such countryside topics as the approaching goose- 
hunting time “Hannah Bay way,” Tom Pant’s silver foxes, 
Long Mary’s good-for-nothing husband, and, of course, 
what the free-traders were doing, were the topics of conver- 
sation. We were somewhat nonplussed that none showed 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS F 


more than a perfunctory interest in news from the frontier 
or concern for the mail we had brought—toward the latter 
not half the avidity one of us would display toward a morn- 
ing paper. It must be remembered, however, that most of 
these men are recruited in their teens from the Old Country. 
Growing up in the service from clerk apprenticeships, they 
become inured to the monotony of post life, its staid con- 
ventions and narrow, unchanging rounds of duty. One 
interest predominates—the Indian hunter and his fur. 

Our host informed us that the chief factor was at Charlton 
Island, some seventy miles out in the Bay. With him we 
would have to make arrangements for further stages of 
travel up the Bay from Charlton. We were provided with 
an open “York” boat and a crew, one Captain John Puggie, 
a half-breed post servant, and three upland Indians, one of 
whom (but not distinguishable save that he was sulkier) was 
Chief of the Moose River Crees. The Indians with their 
moccasins and hooded trade capotes, belted thrice around 
with varicoloured sashes, looked anything but seamen. 

We weighed anchor under lowering sky and rising wind, 
but as we sailed the estuary’s channels, twelve winding miles 
to sea, we had eyes for nothing but the wildfowl around us. 
Before our thrashing sails, outspread like flails, in panic and 
alarm they rose in multitudes—wheeling gulls, skimming 
yellowlegs, darting plover; squawking wood duck, teal, and 
mallard, that, flying low, would circle us; and from willow- 
hidden ponds, with a clash and clamour and clumsy tattoo, 
geese, wildly honking as they climbed awkwardly toward the 
sky. 

Not until we rounded the outer bar did we see the ugly 


6 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


leer in the sky behind us. Ina moment more we were stand- 
ing out among the turbid reaches of the open bay; the faint 
gray stippling of upland trees, the sweeps of the delta plain, 
and the tawny rims of shoreline were lost to view, and walls 
of rain, flayed by a gale piping through the cordage of 
creaking spars and wailing above the slosh and hiss and din 
of the seas around, lashed us, Indians and white men, who 
grouped for shelter in the open hold. We peered with dismay 
from the lost shelter of the outer bar to the tumbling steamy 
wastes ahead, but old Puggie, donning oilers and sou’wester, 
grimly smiled the fact that we were caught, and settled down 
to the helm for a day of it. With only a sweep to hold her— 
the rudder, torn from its pintles, was swept away—Puggie 
landed us on the Island before nightfall. 


18] 


the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur ship which an- 

nually comes out from England. Here, in summer, 
is the rendezvous for fur men from hundreds of miles around, 
who come with their half-breed servants and Indian crews in 
small “York” boats for their year’s mail and goods for their 
post trade. The place was thronged when we arrived, for 
the fur ship lately come had cleared again for England. A 
young Scotchman, just apprenticed to the trade, played his 
bagpipe to the delight and wonder of the visiting Indians, 
half-breed longshoremen, and a group of Eskimo migrants of 
years before from the far-off barrens of the Great Whale 
Coast, three dumpy little men, their solemn-faced wives, and 
bashful troop of miniature Jap children. There was also a 
grizzled white-haired old factor just returned from his first 
furlough in thirty years; the company’s Arctic pilot who had 
lately navigated a Danish brig through the icefields of 
Hudson Strait; and the master, mate, and crew of the 
above-mentioned brig, which, badly wracked by ice, now lay 
abandoned half-heeled on the beach hard by. Her master, 
pulling on his long pipe of porcelain, habitually paced the 
wharf in clattering sabots, deeply distressed over his good 


(J i Hate ISLAND is the deep-sea anchorage of 


ship’s inglorious end. 
When I explained to the chief factor my plan of travelling 
northward, to my dismay he said that such a journey at this 
7 


8 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


late season would be impossible. Snow squalls were already 
flying, while in the country of my destination winter was 
even now at hand. We could only wait at Charlton until a 
schooner came along, then proceed northward along the 
coast to Fort George, winter there, and upon formation of 
the first sea ice, continue north by sledge with Eskimos. 

The journey to Fort George, though less than two hundred 
miles, took ten days to make, for head winds held us weather- 
bound at various of the islands—small, treeless, moss- 
covered granite domes that mask the desolate “‘ East Main.” 
The excitement of goose-hunting amongst them, the calls of 
the crew, the lure to firing range, the volleys, the plunge of 
the kill, and, finally, the goose-roasting supper fires at eve- 
ning—we spitted them on sticks—were memorable experi- 
ences. 

Snow was flying and ice gripped the rails, deck, and rigging 
when we reached Fort George. ‘The factor gave me the best 
he had by way of food and shelter and arranged that as soon 
as the sea ice should form, I was to have dogs, sledge, and two 
drivers for the next stage of travel northward. 

By mid-November, heavy frost was in the air. The 
mouth of the river was soon sealed, and the ponderous banks 
of mist and rime over the open sea drew daily farther away 
as the ice edge crept out. Then came snow, the winter’s 
first big ‘‘drifter,”’ and for three days there was no land or 
sea or sky. 

With winter come, the decrepit walls of the old post 
buildings were soon banked eave-high in a masonry of snow 
as thick as the walls of fortresses. From the entrance of 
the factor’s mansion extended a long passage of snow blocks 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS 9 


head high. The servants’ nondescript summer garb gave 
place to thick capotes of white moleskin, khaki, and blue 
stroud, trimmed at hood and cuff with fur of otter, mink, or 
marten. 

The dogs, starving prowlers of summer, now insolently 
thriving, overran the post, thieving among the provision 
sheds and at kitchen doors, in concert howling to the clang- 
ing of the post bell, and at nightfall, around the huge kettle 
full of steaming cornmeal and tallow as the “dog man” 
cooked it over a leaping fire in the post yard, fighting mur- 
derously like wolves. Unsheltered from the drift they slept 
in moulds melted by their own body heat, all but their black- 
tipped muzzles blanketed in snow. 

Hungry coasters came filtering into the post during the 
first week in December, bringing little or no fur, so the factor 
complained, but with the usual tales of want and distress on 
their hungry lips. Their coming was the sign that the sea 
ice was sufficiently safe for travel. 

My outfit, long since prepared, was soon assembled in the 
post yard. Two drivers, nothing if not picturesque in their 
fur-trimmed capotes, silk-worked gauntlets, elbow long, and 
leggings of blue stroud, edged with red and bound at the 
knees with beadwork garters, bustled here and there among 
the throng of onlookers, harnessing dogs and stringing traces 
to the sledge, while the factor advised me as to camping 
ground and native shelters, and the missionary gave me 
little notes of introduction, written in syllabic Cree, to vari- 
ous of his flock whom I might meet along the way. With 
the dogs howling and straining and leaping to their trace ends 
my drivers made a hurried inspection of the sledge load’s 


10 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


binding; then, waving the throng aside, unlimbered their 
long cracking lash, and we were away, helter-skelter, to the 
embankment edge and half tumbling to the river ice below. 

From where our course lay, far out on the ice at sea, we 


often sighted tepee smoke spiralling above some sheltered 
little wood. The team, when they gained the scent, would 


race madly toward it, plunge over the jagged tidal ice in full 
career, and burst into the encampment clearing only to en- 
gage with the Indians’ dog army in a mélée of fighting. The 
inhabitants, appearing from tepee entrances with sticks, 
whips, or snowshoes, or whatever they could throw, added 
to the din in their efforts at separation. The fighting over, 
they would lend a hand with my luggage and bundle me 
into some cracking firelit tepee interior. The housewives, 
vying with one another, would scurry about to fetch me 
clean spruce-bough bedding, to dust the snow from my fur 
with their willow brooms, to heap fresh fuel upon the fire, to 
fetch in clean snow for the “‘tea snow melting,” and so on 
down to the last detail concerning my comfort their watch- 
ful eyes could see. | 

The hunters from the other tepees would crawl in after the 
meal and lounge with us within the red light of the great 
evening fire. They would have me believe that they merely 
came for a yarn or two with my drivers and news of encamp- 
ments and the post, but I could see from their appraising 
glances that what concerned them most was myself—why 
I came and whither I was bound. My driver’s reply that I 
was making this long journey for no other purpose than to 
see an island of “iron rocks” far north in the “raw meat 
eaters”? land sent them into peals of laughter. The ex- 


—___ 


The raphical Review, Vol.VI, No. 2, 1918, Pl. 
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THE BELCHER ISLANDS II 


planation that from the “iron rocks” are made their guns, 
knives, and axes, was of no avail, for the making of such in- 
explicable things they link with a higher power and let it go 
at that. , 

We all slept as one large family, men, women, cradled 
babes, and children in a circle about the fire, sometimes to be 
wakened by the wail of some restless child, or by the torrent 
of imprecations when some wolf-muzzled brute, having 
chewed a hole through the tepee door, made a desperate 
sally upon the larder. The vents in the tepee’s cone were 
large enough (one could see patches of starlit sky beyond) to 
clear the smoke pall from the dying fire and keep us in cold, 
fresh air. 

Gradually, as we drew out of the Indian’s country, the 
forests gave way to dwarfed and more straggled clumps of 
trees, and the monotony of the low-lying coast was broken 
abruptly by a westward sweep of snow-smoking, kettle- 
shaped hills—the peninsula of Cape Jones—the beginning of 
the semi-barrens of the Eskimo. 

We had an up-hill and down-dale journey of it over the 
Cape—up long steep hills that our tired team could hardly 
climb, or coasting in wild career and galloping over the disks 
of tiny lakes that lay between. On the crest of the last high 
hill, from my drivers came the exclamation, “‘Huskies!”’ 
(Eskimos) and I made out three squares of yellow light 
within the deepest hollow of the hills. 

Three men, their wives, and a troop of wide-eyed children 
who looked like young bear cubs in their shaggy fur clothing 
came out to meet us as we galloped down toward them. 
They were all of them post-trained Eskimos, as their in- 


12 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


congruous combination of trade clothes and native fur 
costumes bespoke—native deerskin parkas, the traders’ 
moleskin trousers, sealskin boots, and trade caps, much too 
small for their bulging crops of hair. The women wore 
native trousers of deerskin and parkas of trade cloth edged 
with red, blue, and yellow tapes with pewter beads and 
spoons and large Canadian pennies dangling and jingling 
from the ends of them. One woman—but this was sheer 
opulence—wore over her shaggy fur trousers a tattered skirt 
of gingham. 

With one Wetunik, headman of the encampment, my 
drivers arranged for a new relay, two Eskimos, sledge, and 
dogs for me, and within the hour turned back for the nearest 
Indian camp to southward. Though a stranger in a strange 
land, for I could speak no Eskimo, I experienced less in- 
convenience than might be imagined, so much can one do 
by way of signs, pantomime,and waving arms. The whole 
encampment—men, women, and children—turned to, to help 
me make camp, some cutting wood from the stunted spruces 
near by, others helping with the tent stakes and lashing can- 
vas. All was soon snug and secure and my camp-stove 
fire vomited sparks out into the night. Beans and bacon 
were frying on the stove, and my eiderdown was unrolled on 
the tent’s snow floor and spread over robes of deerskin. 
Wetunik and his wife lent a hand with the cooking, which, 
though it was done by signs and gestures, drove away the 
loneliness of dining alone. Their enjoyment of supper and 
of a long smoke afterward, expressed in grunting, smiles, and 
many sighs, was eloquent of the lean condition of their lar- 
der, and when I loaded the paunches of their kooletahs with 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS es; 


sea biscuit and tobacco, they could only smile their thank- 
fulness and trudge away through the drift to their own camp 
near by to call out to their waiting family, ““Nucky”’ (food), 
not halfway over. 

With every mile on from the camp of the Eskimos, the 
country became more rugged and more barren. Great soil- 
less slopes of rock tumbled down to sea from a horizon of 
increasingly higher hills. Such trees as grew in pockets and 
ice-gouged hollows seemed to be no larger than potted plants. 
There was little game—here and there a ptarmigan or a white 
fox skulked toward the ice edge out at sea, or, sometimes, like 
a gull in the wake of a ship a lone raven followed our trail. 

Great Whale, the last north post, was from Fort George 
eight days away. Sundown on Christmas Day was our 
twelfth day of sledging, and still no post could we see. 
Darkness came. The wind was bitterly cold. Long since 
I had given up hope of reaching the post that night. Shelter 
and scalding tea was all that I could think of, when the sledge 
shot out upon a sheet of black glare ice. It was the river 
ice of the Great Whale. A single square of yellow light 
shone like a beacon through the darkness. 

A long gaunt figure clad in a hooded capote stalked down, 
lantern in hand, to greet us. He was Harold, the post’s half- 
Indian, half-Swede interpreter. When I stepped within 
the glare of his lantern light, the effect for the moment must 
have been that of an apparition, for a strange white man 
in this country, at this season, was unheard of. I followed 
him to his cabin, a snug little place, snow-walled to the eaves. 
A great two-decked stove, its side glowing red, centred the 
single large deal-panelled room. An old frayed calendar, a 


14 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


few missionary lithographs, and some firearms hung on the 
wall. 

Groups of Eskimos utterly silent and staring whenever my 
eyes were turned away, stood back to walls around me, and 
old Harold’s wife, who for all her white-man’s shoes and 
dress of flowered calico, was an Eskimo, crouched before the 
stove. Old Harold sat beside her, embarrassed and ill at 
ease, gazing into space and silent save when I questioned 
him. All of this to the lash of snow against the cabin walls, 
the dogs’ mournful howls, and the drifters’ unending drone. 


IIT 


-YITH one Nero, old Harold’s interpreter, and a 

\) \ post-servant Eskimo, and a spanking twelve-dog 
team, the last hundred and fifty miles of my trip 

began. More bold and rugged coast flanked the way. We 
often crawled within shadow lengths of cliffs that rose 
straight up from sea. The desolation grew with every mile, 
and native camps were few and wide apart. The days were 
cold, the sledge runners scrunched over snow as dry and as 
gritty as sand, and the low ground drift plastered white the 


muzzles of the team. 

Nero was famed far and wide as one of two—the other was 
his brother ‘‘Husky Bill’ —who could speak, albeit in pidgin 
fashion, a few words of English. Our common language 
made for an intimacy between us. He constituted himself 
my special bodyguard. On drifting days when to bare my 
hands to fill and light a pipe was much too cold, he per- 
formed that office for me. He was master of the grub box 
and sleeping bag. With his teeth he pulled off my boots of 
sealskin, at turning-in time at night, and was master of 
ceremonies generally at every camp along the way. 

Gulf Hazard, three days on, marked the end of trees; so 
we put in to a last little grove and took on wood for a last 
wood-fire meal at noon. We moved slowly, bending into a 
thick, drifting wind. All, save the black rock masses of the 
slopes of coast which loomed through veils of drift, was white 

15 


16 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


desolation. We veered close into the coast as night ap- 
proached, on the watch for a camp ground within the shelter 
of some little cove or embankment arm, when, as we rounded 
a point, the dogs started baying, and from Nero came the 
word “‘Innuet.”’ There was a momentary respite from the 
blur of drift, and I barely made out the domes of a village of 
snow houses. 

From the black voids of igloo tunnel mouths came shaggy 
beings on hands and knees and the bounding forms of dogs. 
Leather-faced as I was, and dressed as were the men, the 
Eskimo. took me, for the moment, to be one of their own 
kind, but when they found their mistake there was a peal of 
laughter, and peering close, they wrung my hand again, 
with unintelligible exclamations the while as to the novelty 
that Nero had brought amongst them. 

On hands and knees through a low tunnel I followed Nero 
who, whip-butt in hand, cowed the dogs as we brushed them 
by, and within twenty feet squeezed through a door into a 
large igloo dome. The housewife, her naked babe nestled 
warmly in the depths of her kooletah hood, turned from the 
trimming of her seal-oil lamp which lit the white cavern with 
a feeble yellow cast, and welcomed us. Her babe, too, poked 
out its tiny naked arm for the hand-shaking. 

A frozen seal carcass which lay on the snow floor, a nest of 
yelping puppies in a niche of the igloo wall, willow mats, and 
robes of bear and deerskin were the igloo’s furnishings. 

A supply of black plug tobacco, needles, and bright- 
coloured trade candy was a principal part of my outfit to be 
given as presents to our various hosts along the way. Nero, 
of course, officiated on occasions when the presents were 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS Vy 


‘given out—“‘sweetie-give-’em”’ was his name for it, which at 
this camp obtained the proportions of a small festival. 

’—flinging handfuls to 
the scrambling, squealing throng, upended, their seal-booted 
legs thrashing air—attracted the grown-ups from the igloos 
adjoining and packed our igloo full. The odour of skin 
clothes and seal-oil lamp became increasingly intolerable 
until Nero, noticing my distress, shooed them out into the 
open again, explaining diplomatically that “Angarooka”’ 


The result of ‘“‘sweetie-give-’em’ 


(the white master), “‘him sick nose!”’ 

Five days in all I spent prowling about the iron-bearing 
cliff faces of the islands which I had come all this way to 
examine. Breaking off rock samples here and there and 
taking close-up photographs in the acid month of January 
were not pleasant tasks, but less pleasant still was the fact 
that the result of all my examination showed that the sup- 
posed deposits of iron ore of the Nastapokas were too hope- 
lessly lean to be of the slightest economic importance. I 
had to face the fact that all the long journey had been for 
nothing. 

Discouraged, I was on the point of starting back for camp 
in order to pack and strike off south again over the gulf of 
600 miles that stood between me and the Ground Hog fron- 
tier, when Nero pointed out to sea over leagues and leagues of 
ice that lay before us to a horizon of gray-black rime, pon- 
derously spiralling. “Big land over there,” he said and 
added, explaining the source of his information, “Husky, 
him say so.” 

In a moment, Wetalltok, the Eskimo of Charlton Island, 
sprang to mind; and I remembered the details of a certain 


18 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


day when Johnny Miller, the Company’s interpreter, Wetall- 
tok, and I were gathered around the latter’s old sea chest of 
curios. 

“Yes, sir,” Johnny had said, nodding toward Wetailltok, 
‘“‘he is full of stories of the North, sir. All the time he is 
talking of his hunting ground and how long ’tis since he’s 
seen it; and ’tis a long time, I do know, for he’s been here 
eighteen years with me.” 

“But where does he come from—the Great Whale Coast?” 
I asked, hoping he might have information of the country 
whither I was bound. 

“No, ’tis islands, sir, he says, far off from the Great Whale 
Coast at sea.” 

Then for a long time Wetalltok had talked to Johnny in 
Eskimo. ‘‘He has been telling me things about them is- 
lands, sir,” said Johnny when the conversation ended. 

“Where are these islands?” said I in idle curiosity, pulling 
out my travelling map. Wetalltok scanned it long and 
earnestly, at a loss, I thought, to understand; but finally he 
pointed to the little dots of land marked on the chart as the 
Belchers. “‘An’ queer it is, sir,” said Johnny, interpreting, 
“but he says the white man makes his islands small enough.” 

Then from a litter, odds and ends of tools, old carvings of 
ivory, harness toggles, harpoon heads, and the like, Wetall- 
tok drew out an old coloured lithograph, tattered and torn. 
On the back of it, in pencil and crudely drawn, was a map, 
obviously handiwork of his own. “He says these is the real 
islands, sir,’ said Johnny as Wetalltok spread it out before 
me. “Here is his old winter sealin’ ground,” as Wetalltok 
pointed to the spot, “‘and here,” he continued, still interpret- 








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THE BELCHER ISLANDS 19 


ing, ‘“is where he hunted walrus, two days’ kayakin’ farther 
north.” 

“Two days by kayak!’ said I in astonishment. ‘‘How 
many miles, Johnny, do you think Wetalltok could go in 
two days?” 

“Well, sir,” said Johnny, “the seventy miles from here to 
Moose would be easy travellin’, sir.” 

Seventy miles! [scanned the map. ‘Good Lord, if that 
is true, here are islands that must be a hundred miles long.”’ 

“Yes, sir,” said Johnny, in his most non-committal man- 
ner. 

Wetalltok, carefully weighing his words, went on: 

Here was the country where the geese nested in spring, 
and where, during the summer days when the geese had shed 
their wing feathers and were unable to fly, he and his family 
used to capture them by running them down. Here in an- 
other place was the bear country, where bears were many 
when the icefields broke up in spring, and here (pointing 
to groups of little outlying islands) were the rookeries of sea 
pigeons and eiders that were many—they made clouds in the 
sky. “And here’—as Wetalltok pointed to what I sup- 
posed, since it was so extraordinarily large, must be an 
indentation of the sea—‘*‘is where he caught the rare fresh- 
water seal and made his salmon kills. ’Tis a lake, sir,” said 
Miller; “‘that is, he says so, sir.” 

Then for an interval Wetalltok talked in Eskimo to 
Johnny Miller. Finally Miller continued: ‘‘He says, sir, 
from the south end, and looking north, the lake is like the 
sea—no land, just water, and then the sky.” 

If Wetalltok had told me that some sea serpent had sud- 


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As they were shown on the Admiralty charts. This depiction was made by 


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HUDSON BAY AND THE FICTIONARY BELCHER 
Captain Coates, a famous shipmaster in the employ of the Hudson’s Bay Company 


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ISLANDS 
in 1700, and continued to appear on the Admiralty charts up to the present day. 



























































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HUDSON BAY AND THE REAL BELCHER ISLANDS 


As they were shown to be by Mr. Flaherty. For two hundred and fifty years the 
once-a-year fur ships of the Hudson’s Bay Company had been sailing within a few 
miles of this archipelago with no idea of its size. 
















































































oval Weep tn enbee 
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22 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


denly risen from the sea, picked him up and carried him to 
some little island, and then tenderly and carefully launched 
him in the tip-top of some waving tree, his story could hardly 
have seemed more absurd. What! Not only islands, 
Heaven knows how long, but on one of them a lake with a 
horizon like the sea; and all this mass of land occupying an 
Admiralty-charted water, where were plotted deep-sea sound- 
ings and multitudes of mere dots of islands! How could such 
a tale possibly be true? Why, the deep-sea ships of the 
Hudson’s Bay Company through a period of more than two 
centuries must have passed along not far from them! 

Wetalltok had given me his map, and I had accepted it 
merely as a memento of a picturesque liar of the broad north 
country. But now Nero’s mention of these strange islands 
struck me as being more than a coincidence, and I deter- 
mined on my return to Great Whale to sift the source of 
Nero’s information and satisfy myself once for all as to the 
truth of Wetalltok’s strange tale. 

We were two weeks on the return to Great Whale, en- 
countering the worst weather and the hardest travel of the 
year. For four days on end we were marooned on an island 
while the sea ice, broken, whilst we slept, from its fastening 
along the coast, sailed out to sea before a driving nor’easter. 
When the wind from the west blew it in again, it came in 
broken pans and rafted fields. Some dog or other kept fall- 
ing between the floes as we picked our way along. Hauling 
them out amid a din of howls, drying feet, and while Nero 
pinioned the snapping heads, freeing their toes of small cut- 
ting particles of ice, what with the cold and drift, were, as 
Nero said, ‘“‘Damn hard time.” 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS 23 


Old Harold shook his head doubtfully when I finished my 
tale of Wetalltok’s map and Nero’s story. “‘We see some of 
them islanders every year,” said Harold, ““when they come 
in over the sea ice to trade, and none of them says what mon- 
sters is them islands, sir.” 

I started on a new tack. “How many Eskimos live on 
the island?”” Harold hesitated for a long while, then en- 
gaged Nero and his servants in conversation and began 
counting up the heads of island families that in years gone 
by had traded at Great Whale. Finally came the answer, 


“Not less than one hundred and fifty all told.” 
“Do you think, then,” said I, “that a hundred Eskimos 


could hunt their way, year in and year out, on any but a 
large mass of land? For,” I added, “between Cape Jones 
and Gulf Hazard, a distance of two hundred miles, there 
are hardly more than one hundred and fifty Eskimos, and 
you know the fight they have for game.” 

To make a long story short, Harold was inclined to believe 
that in Wetalltok’s map and story there might be something 


more than fiction. For the succeeding two days he closely 
questioned the Eskimos of all the countryside, and the sum 


of the information thus gained, though vague and broken, 
gave more than a hint of corroboration. 

Down over the sea ice to Moose Factory, and on up the 
frozen Moose, within two months, I reached the “line,” 
and the last of the eleven hundred miles of journeying was 
over. Conviction of the truth of Wetalltok’s strange tale 
had grown with every mile. 


IV 


33 HE northern boundary of the tremendously impor- 
tant iron-ore field of northern Minnesota is, roughly 
speaking, the boundary between the United States 

and Canada. For years after the opening up of these fabulous 
deposits, extensions were explored for on the Canadian side. 
It seemed a foregone conclusion that such were bound to 
occur. For the last twenty-five years, however, thousands 
of square miles throughout northern Ontario have been ex- 
plored in vain. The writer’s father, as representative of 
one of the large operating companies in Minnesota, carried 
on a large part of this exploration. We found in the boulder 
débris along various parts of this Height of Land, iron ore 
float similar in character to some of the Minnesota ores. In 
one region we found it in such quantities that extensive ex- 
plorations were undertaken through the surrounding country 
in an attempt to locate the body of it in the ground. The 
source was never found. When, however, I examined the 
ores on the Nastapokas, I recognized at once that they and 
the float that I had seen years before were identical.} 


1Dr. C. K. Leith, who is a well-known authority on the geology of northern Minnesota 
and Michigan, made his examination of the Nastapokas during the summer preceding my 
own journey. His monograph gives an excellent description of the island formations; 
his conclusions, offered tentatively owing to the limited time he had for investigation, he 
summarizes as follows: 

“From an economic standpoint the repetition of essentially Lake Superior conditions in 
the Hudson Bay country cannot but be of interest . . . when it is remembered that 
the enormous deposits of iron, copper, nickel, and cobalt on the south side of the Archzean 
protaxis are, with very few exceptions, associated with Algonkian rocks, and late Algonkian 
at that, rather than with Archean rocks. There are yet no discoveries to warrant close 


24 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS 25 


Though I had found nothing of economic interest in the 
iron-ore measures of the Nastapokas, the information which 
I had received from Wetalltok, the Eskimo, that to seaward 
of the Nastapokas, “‘two days’ fast sledging over the sea ice,”’ 
were a group of islands which, if he spoke the truth, were 
incredibly large, was in itself interesting enough as an in- 
ducement for exploration. But that which made it doubly 
interesting was a certain statement I found in a geological re- 
port upon my return to Lower Canada. The statement was 
part of a report, dated 1884, of Dr. Robert Bell, to the effect 
that when in Nastapoka country he had received from Eski- 
mos who had come in from the islands out at sea fragments of 
rock which led him to believe that the rock system of these 
islands was similar to that of the Nastapokas.' 

If Doctor Bell’s surmise was correct and Wetalltok’s 
statement was anywhere near the truth—discounting it by 
half, the land mass he described could in area be not less 
than 2,000 square miles—here was work to do. 


commercial comparison of the two regions. — “‘An Algonkian Basin in Hudson Bay—A 
comparison with the Lake Superior Basin,” Econ. Geology, 1910 vol. V, pp. 227—46; ref- 
erence on p. 246. 


1Robert Bell: “Observations on the Geology, Zodlogy and Botany of Hudson’s Strait and 
Bay, made in 1885,” Report DD of Annual Rept. Geol. Survey of Canada, vol. 1 for 1885, 
Montreal, 1885, p. 14. 

A. P. Low in one of his reports refers to a projected exploration of the Belcher Islands 
that was not carried out. Probably he, too, had received interesting information from the 
natives concerning them. The reference is of interest as evidence of the ice conditions 
that may obtain in the bay during the summer months. 

““At Great Whale River we were again delayed by ice until the 7th of July, when we were 
advised by all the Eskimos to abandon our proposed trips to the Belcher Islands, which lie 
about seventy miles off the coast and about which, owing to the prevalence of westerly 
winds during the early summer, the ice would be very thick. This advice proved correct 
as the Hudson’s Bay Company’s ship, Lady Head, was beset with heavy ice as far south as 
Bear Island in James Bay, where the ice was left on the 20th of August.” 

Probably, also, he had in mind Doctor Bell’s remarks on certain rock specimens sup- 
posed to have been broken from the fixed rocks of the Belchers and his belief that these 
specimens indicated the extension to the Belchers of the Nastapoka series. 


26 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


To explore Wetalltok’s islands, then, was the object of a 
second expedition. At Moose Factory I secured the dimin- 
utive 36-foot Nastapoka and engined her with a motor we 
had canoed and packed down from the frontier. 

By the time we had journeyed up the east coast to Great 
Whale River, the season was well advanced. Moreover, 
among the Eskimos of Great Whale the Nastapoka did 
not inspire confidence. They looked askance at the fire- 
spitting, rifle-cracking innards of the craft. Much bar- 
gaining, tempting offers, good old Harold’s “fur trade”’ 
support, and Nero’s argument that “all same noise like oun 
never mind, scare ’em seal, that’s all,” finally overcame their 
prejudices. 

Old Harold celebrated the day we left—the Company’s 
standard flew from the flagpole and Eskimo half-breed ser- 
vants and groups of children lined the rim of the river’s high 
bank, as we, far below them, scooted like a water bug out to- 
ward the sea. 

Swinging up along the bold flanks of the coast, for three 
calm sunlit days we cruised happily along. Seals innumer- 
able popped their heads through the glass around us, and 
there were whirring flocks of ducks and eiders, so the crew 
had food in plenty and smiled their content. 

At nightfall of the third day we reached the point—a small 
island outlying the Gulf Hazard mainland some five miles— 
from which I planned to strike out over the open sea for 
Wetalltok’s islands. In the only harbour available, one ex- 
posed to all the winds save those blowing from the west, 
which then prevailed, we anchored for the night. But 
within the hour the wind chopped around and blew in upon 


(SANVISI YAHO1A®) 
dil aL AOU Is .V NOS Va) Ned IN Tae a i AO eer) 


4 
Z 














THE BELCHER ISLANDS oe 


us from the north. The wind rose as black night settled 
down. We paid out all the anchor chain, hoping to hang on 
against morning. But the Nastapoka, her anchors dragging, 
was forced foot by foot toward shore. By midnight she was 
piled aground while breaking seas flushed gear and food from 
the cabin and open hold. 

When daylight came the battered Nastapoka stood half 
heeled before us on the sands. We took stock of the wet 
and bedraggled state of our affairs. The Eskimos, their 
minds on food, combed the beach. As they were out of 
sight for some little time I set out to find them. They were 
not far distant, huddled behind a group of boulders, bent 
double, their arms wrapped about their middles and in chorus 
groaning. Lying near them were the empty containers of a 
considerable quantity of dried apples upon which of course 
they had stuffed themselves and then—drunk water! 

After three days of caulking, patching, and re-rigging the 
Nastapoka’s running gear and mending torn and tattered 
sails, we limped on down to Great Whale Post. By the 
time we arrived the sailing season was over. 

Then, said Nero, 4e would see me to Wetalltok’s islands. 
With dogs and sleds, he said, we would cross over the ice- 
fields in winter, during the six weeks of February and March 
when the ice is immovable. We shook hands over it and 
agreed to wait until the “‘seeco [ice], him strong.” 

Before Nero and I could begin the journey, five months 
must elapse. I sounded Mavor, the factor, as to the possi- 
bility of wintering with him, but a rough inventory of his 
mess supply showed a meagre quantity of food barely sufh- 
cient for his own needs. So I prepared to travel 180 miles 


28 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


south to more opulent Fort George. No “York” boat crew 
at this late season was obtainable. They feared being 
caught by the freeze-up on the way. The bruised and 
battered Nastapoka was useless. By canoe was the only 
way. Poor Mavor, in his eighth year of factorship at God- 
forsaken old Great Whale, was loath to see me go. He felt 
that he must go too if for nothing more than the change of 
scene; the loneliness he said was “getting” him. So he made 
old Harold his deputy, and we launched out in a post canoe 
for Fort George with a “You'll be froze in on the way, sir,” 
from old Harold ringing in our ears. 

Five and a half months later found me back again at 
Great Whale. Nero had come down a hundred miles from 
his hunting ground and was waiting. Harold, however, 
gave me disquieting news. ‘The islanders’ annual migration 
into the post for trade had not materialized—they were, he 
said, weeks overdue. ‘“‘I doesn’t understand it, sir,” said. 
he, ‘“‘the huskies here says the ice is strong and holdin’ all 
along the coast. But their not coming means there’s some- 
thing wrong with it somewhere, sir.” Nero, however, ex- 
plained the delay—“Seals, him not plenty. When seals 
him plenty, him come sure.” Waiting in vain for the 
glimpse of black specks winding through the rough icefields 
out at sea, Nero and I decided finally to start, islanders or no 
islanders. 

It was long after sleep-time. With all our plans settled 
for the following morning’s departure, I pulled on my koole- 
tah and prepared to trudge over to my own sleeping quarters 
and turn in. From out-of-doors came the din of howling 
and snarls and yells and yelps of fighting. A sledge or more 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS 29 


of natives had arrived. The door burst in and an old 
Eskimo, one Pitchalock, of Little Whale, brushing the drift 
from his deer-fur clothing, strode into the room. Drinking a 
pannikin of scalding tea, he rattled out unintelligible words 


% 


the while—‘*‘seeco,” “‘annohie,” “‘komitik,” “cukuktinnie.”’ 
Eventually we gathered that three sleeps to northward the 
ice, broken, was driv:ng out tosea. On one driving pan was 
a team of dogs entangled in their harnesses, the dogs of 
islanders. Harold surmised that they had been caught by 
the break-up on crossing over. 

“°Tis bad luck you’re havin’, sir,” said old Harold, “for 
in the twenty-eight years I have been here, ’tis only the 


second time the ice has broke.”’ 


When six months later I returned to Lower Canada, Sir 
William, with a persistence altogether characteristic, said, 
“Get a ship.”? This meant a Newfoundland schooner and 
crew and a cruise north along the Labrador and through 
Hudson Strait and south, this time along the upper half of 
the East Main of Hudson Bay. The topsail schooner Laddie, 
seventy-five feet over all and eighty-five tons net register, 
was purchased for the work. 

The Laddie had been through Hudson Strait before. 
“But no glory to ’er,” one of my crew informed me. ‘‘She 
had three mounted police aboard an’ relief for the police 
post at Cape Fullerton, on the west side of the Bay. When 
she reached the Strait, what wasn’t head wind was ice—big 
Fox Channel ice, miles and miles of it, swingin’ out for the 
North Atlantic. By the time she cleared the ice September 
was come, an’ there was more winds, head on. Well, sir, 


30 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


she beat till she was almost in sight of the hungry post at 
Cape Fullerton. Then snow come, an’ a heavy gale. She 
got adrubbin’, sir. In four days she was near halfway back 
to the Strait. Says the skipper, ‘Relief for Fullerton or no, 
the Laddie clears for Newfoundland.’ And she did.” 

For four weeks the Laddie, in dock, was re-rigged and over- 
hauled from bow to stern, and belted with greenheart to 
shield her from the ice. When we had stuffed and crammed 
and stowed away our outfit in her hold she stood burdened 
to the rails, with lumber for winter huts, oil—fifty barrels of 
it in nets lashed together—and the long winter’s coal in bags 
piled high. Our fresh beef and bags of vegetables swung 
from the rigging and ladder-ways. 

The old sea dogs who for days had been hanging about the 
wharf predicted as the time dragged on that we were “‘o’er 
late to go pokin’ up through Hudson Strait.” O’er late we 
were, but at last the great day, the 14th of August, came. 
With a chantey, the crew winched the anchors to the rails. 
There were salutes from the fishing craft around. A pom- 
pous little tug made fast our hawser, and slowly towed us 
through the bottle neck of St. John’s Harbour. Forests of 
masts and long fingers of wharves, our last sight of c:viliza- 
tion slowly panoramed from view, and as the friendly tug 
let go our hawser and stepped aside, we rolled out into the 
long swells of the North Atlantic. 

From the mild blue skies of Newfoundland, within the 
fortnight we were a thousand miles to northward running 
close-hauled through squalls of snow into the mouth of 
Hudson Strait. The giant cliffs of Resolution, rising sheer 
from a white lash of sea, were our first sight of land north 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS RI 


of Labrador. From Resolution into the bare rock flanks of 
the Strait’s north coast, Baffin Land, the days were fair 
enough, light catspaws of wind and gray snowy-looking 
skies. Here and there bergs of gigantic size sailed proudly 
with the tide. Streams of emerald cascaded over their 
flanks. Strata of gulls stood etched against the gray-white 
immensity of their walls. 

On from the “‘saddle-backs,” the smooth rounded mass of 
coast with its clean, long, curving lines of shore gave way to 
broken, erratic sweeps masked by multitudes of little high 
rock islands. Washed by enormous tides, at flood whole 
groups of them were reefs or under sea. ‘‘No water for an 
honest ship, sir,” said the skipper. Carefully sounding our 
way, we crawled into a nest of islands for the night’s shelter. 
We threw both anchors into the good mud bottom of a little 
island’s enfolding arms, into what the lead line showed was 
seven fathoms fore and aft. All hands but the watch turned 
in tosleep. The night was still. No breath of wind. The 
aurora raked to and fro across the sky. I was still awake 
when the watch, clattering to the companionway, bawled, 
““She’s grounding, sir!’’ While we held our lanterns over- 
head and tried to peer down into the darkness, she slowly 
began heeling until she lay on her beam-ends, high and dry. 
The deck load, lumber, coal, and casks of oil, I feared, would 
slide through the bulwarks; but unable to see, all we could 
do was to cling through the night to the rigging and ladders 
of the upper rail. When at last daylight came, we found 
that the Laddie was berthed in a cushion of soft mud and 
ooze. A reef, over which her back would have broken had 
she stranded there, lay less than ten feet away. 


32 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


We zigzagged in our attempts to beat through the five 
hundred miles of Strait, from the island mask of Baffin Land, 
south to the sheer thousand-foot coast of Cape Hope’s Ad- 
vance and Wakeham Bay, for the winds and squalls of snow 
were baffling. Too late to gain a wintering base in the Bay, 
we put into Amadjuak Bay three hundred and fifty miles in 
on the coast of Baffin Land. Here with the aid of some forty 
Eskimos, enthusiastic over the advent of the “kablunak,”’ 
with his precious stores and goods for trade, ship was dis- 
charged by dories and kayaks of the Eskimos catamaraned. 
Where they disgorged on rocky ledges of shore, old men, 
women with babes bobbing in their hoods, and children of 
assorted sizes in an antlike stream, packed boxes, bales, and 
bundles over the rocks to the wintering base site. Within a 
week a village of topeks (tents of sealskin) along with four 
white wedges of tents of canvas and, in the centre of them 
all, our hut of white lumber roofed with black tar paper stood 
looking out over the bare rock desolation. 

By the last week of September my three men and I were 
settled for the year and the good old Laddie, just the day be- 
fore the first skin ice formed over the harbour’s face, sailed 
slowly out, bound for her winter berth in Newfoundland. 

Through the ten months of winter we had enough to do. 
There were two thousand miles of sledging along the coast 
and reconnaissances inland to the great lake of Amadjuak. 
There, too, was the task of filming as much as might be of 
the lives of the Eskimos. But all of this is another story. 


When the winter had finally worn away, through the 
long light of warm July days we watched each new patch of 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS Sa 


blue-green water where it shone resplendent among the white 
waste of the icefields at sea. But of signs of a break-up 
there were none. Even when August came, Eskimos, 
bringing us the eggs of gulls and eiders, were sledging still 
over the ice from distant lands. ‘‘The summer is slow in 
coming,” they said, and they worried over it too, for the 


UNGAVA 


PENINSULA 


aN 
ite of Wrech\ 3. 
on 3. 


ndian Harbor 





£ 
& Scale of Miles 
0 100 200 300 
VP baike char ee EE TRE te. 
ROUTE OF THE SCHOONER LADDIE 


From St. John’s to Moose Factory the trip took more than a year. Because 
of the late start, Mr. Flaherty and his party were forced to winter at Amadjuak Bay, 
sending the Laddie back to St. John’s. The following summer the schooner returned. 
She was nearly crushed in an ice pack, but escaped and picked up the party at 
Amadjuak Bay, continuing toward the Belcher Islands. She was wrecked in a fog, 
but managed to get off the rocks at high tide, and made a landing on the Belchers. 
Her condition was so bad, however, that she was taken to Moose Factory for re- 
pairs, delaying the real work of exploration until the next summer. 


34 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


time of their summer migration along the coast was near at 
hand. 

Not until the tenth day of August did we waken to see, 
where so long had lain the great white waste of ice, the blue- 
green of open sea. To the highest hill of the harbour’s 
mouth I sent one of our families of Eskimos to encamp, to 
signal us with a moss-fire smoke as soon as the Laddie hove 
in view. 

The summer was nearly gone when on the nineteenth of 
August the Laddie sailed in to our relief. Hemmed in by 
ice along Labrador, for nearly two months she had been en 
route. ‘“We was nipped in Grey Straits, sir,” he continued, 
“what with the ice raftin’ an’ pilin’ up around us an’ 
a-squeezin’ so. Ne’er adoor would open. Even the fuel tank 
to the starboard was busted. I thought it would raft to the 
yardarms. With ’lasses and hardtack and matches in a bot- 
tle and fuel and a bit of clothin’, charts, and a compass we 
unlimbered the dories and made off on an ice pan and stood 
there listenin’ to ’er timbers creakin’ and groanin’ and the 
thuddin’ of the ice pilin’ and pilin’ up around her. I turned 
to figurin’ out how we could haul the dories over the ice to 
open water. I climbed some rafted ice to get a sight for a 
course through it when right before me eyes I saw a lead of 
blue water, and widenin’ as I watched it. ”Iwas the tide 
on the turn, sir, and I knew that once more Id be climbin’ up 
over the Laddie’s rail. And sure enough the ice slackened off, 
sir, and we was away two hours on with a bone in our teeth.” 

Within a week we were ready to sail, bound at last for 
Wetalltok’s mysterious land. The wintering base now dis- 
mantled was a forlorn and empty shell. To the faithful and 








© REVILLON FRERES,N-Y ROBERT J. FLAHERTY, FREES 


ESKIMO OMIAK IN THE SPRING 





THE BELCHER ISLANDS 35 


kindly Eskimos who had served us so well, we gave out the 
last we had—a mirror with a gilt frame, old blankets, cloth- 
ing, old shoes, precious bits of metal, and an old alarm 
clock with one hand, knives, old pots and kettles and pans, 
and most wonderful of all, some oranges from the Laddie— 
““peeruwalluk pumwa”’ (the very best of all that is sweet), 
they said. Enraptured, they rubbed them against their 
noses. 

We said our good-byes regretfully enough. Anxiously 
they inquired if ever they should see us again. I had not the 
courage to be definite on that point; I knew that when sum- 
mer again rolled around they would climb to the highest hill, 
hopeful for a sight of us. 


Vv 


E HAD clear water through the Straits, for the 

VW migration of the icefields to the North Atlantic 

from Hudson Bay had long since passed. Follow- 
ing the snow-capped cliffs of Wolstenholme which lean a 
thousand feet down to sea, we turned into Hudson Bay. 
Within thirty miles the giant blocks of coast had stepped 
down to a mere thread of land apparently no higher than 
the scattered ice pans which drifted by at sea. The only 
break in a hundred miles of its monotony was the brow of 
Cape Sir Thomas Smith still alight with the last yellow flood 
of a big, drowsy ball of sun. 

On the third day we hit the Ottawas, the northernmost of 
the groups of islands which, as the maps show, parallel the 
East Main for a distance of some four hundred miles. Along 
the line of this group, south some two hundred miles, we 
hoped to find Wetalltok’s land. Black barren masses of vol- 
canic rock are the Ottawas. There is not even the tawn and 
russet of the mosses to relieve their bleak desolation. As we 
wore into the coast, the mate climbed to the crow’s-nest on a 
lookout for a break ahead which might lead into a harbour. 
Flocks of eiders from rock ledges of the shore rose in alarm as 
we approached, and in whirring flights circled us. The 
screams of gulls were constantly inthe air. A herd of walrus, 
holding to the edge of a drifting ice pan with their gleaming 


tusks, let go and with a resounding splash dived from view. 
36 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS 37 


Suddenly the mate’s bawling, “Man ahead, sir,”’ brought 
us with a rush to the ladder-ways. In a moment more we | 
stood abreast of a yawning mouth of harbour and before us 
stood a ship riding at anchor, beyond it, on shore, a hut, and 
beside it a flag mast from which a Union Jack was breaking 
~ out upon the wind. 

The Active she proved to be, one of the veteran whalers 
of Dundee. Having completed her winter and summer 
whaling, she was about to clear again for Scotland. Both 
the winter and summer, they said, had been hard—little 
chance for whales. The winter was one of constant gales 
and nearly all the summer through they had been hemmed 
in by vast fields of ice. They were on the last legs of their 
rations; one of the crew, with a drawn and doleful face, 
begged of me whatever “‘soft”’ food I might have—“‘ oatmeal 
and the like, sir’ —then showed me a toothless pair of gums. 

““Do you mean to tell me,” said I, “that you had the 
hardihood to leave Scotland without a tooth in your head?”’ 

““No, sir,” said he, “but you know how it is, sir, a few 
drinks before you leave and then the wee bit of an upset the 
day after, sir, what with the ship’s rollin’ an’ all; so to tell 
you the truth, sir, I heaved them over the rail, sir!” 

During the winter two of the ship’s harpooners had died 
of delirium tremens. The last trace we saw of the 4ctive as 
we swung off for the south were two wooden crosses, grim 
silhouettes against the sky. 

Icefields lay not far from us. All day long an ice “blink”’ 
loomed in the west. “If the wind swings, ’tis fog we'll be 
havin’, sir,” the skipper said. And sure enough by morning 
great banks of it lay around us. As the day wore on, how- 


38 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


ever, it thinned to a milky haze, but notwithstanding, we 
almost bumped into one low-worn rib of rock. On an hour 
farther, though there was no land in view, we looked down 
through the emerald to the bouldery bottom of the shoals. 
Carefully for three days we crept on. Some one of the crew 
was constantly in the crow’s nest and the leadsman stood 
always ready in the bow. We had no suns for latitude, but 
at nightfall the log showed a southing from the Ottawas of 
two hundred miles—we were at last in the neighbourhood of 
Wetalltok’s islands. | 

“But we might as well be in the neighbourhood of a reef 
or two, what with this fog and all,’ was the captain’s obser- 
vation. “‘We ought to be up and out of it, sir, to a snug har- 
bour until it comes clear again. ’Tis one thing we know, sir 
—the mainland is to east’ard and no more nor seventy miles 
with a harbour waiting us. With no sun for sights and only 
a log and dead reck’nin’ clean down from the Ottawas and 
tides playin’ hell with us the while—why, as ’tis, sir, we’re 
nowhere.” 

So we squared away before a light wind and laid a course 
through the night, the captain cheerful over the prospect of 
what he called the “tender arms”’ of a harbour before morn- 
ing. The timid piping of the wind, the rattle of blocks 
along the boom, and the monotone of a song from the helms- 
man were the only sounds. 

“Well, sir,” said the skipper finally, looking up from his 
game of solitaire on the cabin table, “delay or no, it’s lucky 
we're gettin’ clear of it all. We'll be ridin’ at anchor by 
mornin’ in a fine, fine ” when crash! bang! we pitched 
in a heap to the floor. 





THE BELCHER ISLANDS 39 


A wild ground-swell broke over the stern, picked up the 
Laddie and hurled her with thuds that sent the lamps, the 
charts, telescopes, guns, and shelf-loads of crockery crashing 
to the floor, into the teeth of a boiling reef. The rifle-like 
cracking of sails, the hiss and slosh and din of breaking seas, 
and the pounding of the Laddie up and down, up and down— 
I thought the spars and rigging would rattle out of her. 
When we peered down over the rails to nests of boulders and 
the wash of seas, splinters the length of a man rose up and 
drifted off into the void. There was no launching the dories 
in that blackness, we could only hope the Laddie would hold 
till morning. “All hands to the hold !”’ sang out the captain, 
and we dug up her boulder ballast piece by piece and passing 
it through a chain of hands, dropped it over the rail. We 
stripped the Laddie to the skin, which heaved as her bottom 
-struck the bar. We gave her up then and climbed to deck, 
provisioned the dories, and waited for dawn. 

When dawn did come a blanket of fog lay around us. The 
wind, however, had died and the sea smoothed out to long 
rolls of glass. A blur of yellow burned through the milk of 
sky. In an hour the fog began melting away, and a half 
mile to starboard an island stood out through the dissolv- 
ing mists. With the dories we put off, wallowing through 
the dying swells and on, sprawling on crests of surf, in to 
shore. 

It was not much of an island—a level, soilless bed of rock, 
a mere platform rising out of sea. A ring of boulders at one 
place showed where long since had stood the topek of some 
wandering Eskimos. Near by was a seal-oil lamp which, 
fashioned out of a piece of driftwood, had been made in an 


40 * MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


emergency and seemed to point to the fact that whoever had 
camped there had met with misadventure, perhaps the 
break-up of the ice while travelling on the icefields. 

Caching among boulders all the freight of food and gear 
the dories had brought ashore, we returned to ship to take 
off the last odds and ends before we abandoned her. We 
found to our amazement that though the tide was near flood 
there was not much water in the well. 

“By gad, sir,” the skipper said, “though with my own 
eyes I saw enough splinters comin’ up and floatin’ off to make 
a raft, yet here she is, sir, dry asa bone. Not only that, sir, 
but if the tide come high, and it should, sir, what with all 
these winds blowin’ from the one quarter, there’s the chance 
that we can hobble her over the reef.” 

So to work we went with a will. Thirty-five casks of oil, 
all that remained of heavy cargo, we threw into the sea, then 
dropped an anchor some 300 feet ahead, put on all sails, and 
opened up the engine. With “heave-ho’s”’ from the crew 
winding at the winch and “Now she comes, me byes, now 
she comes,” from the skipper, slowly, inch by inch, the 
Laddie moved. The crew broke out into a chantey as she 
gathered way. “An alligator, I calls her,” the skipper 
cried and called for a ““mug up” for all hands. When a 
light breeze an hour on tore up the last shrouds of fog which 
had lain over us so long, it revealed the hole into which we 
had poked the Laddie’s nose. The white boils of reefs were 
everywhere. In no direction could we see a single straight 
lane of water through which the Laddie could get out to open 
sea. I knew then that the reason we had not run aground 
was that a strong magnetic attraction had kept swinging the 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS 4i 


compass by which the helmsman kept his course. Literally, 
the Laddie had wound her way into land. 

‘°Tis no place fur us, sir,” said the skipper, and he hailed 
the mate and two of the crew who had gone off to the island 
for fresh water. 

“We've seen big land, sir,” they called as they clambered 
up over the rail, and explained that they had glimpsed it 
when they climbed a hill on the island. 

“Big land?” says the skipper. ““ You means the mainland.” 

“Naw, sir,” said the mate, 
west ard and there’s sixty miles or more of it, for ’tis spread 


’ ¢ 


‘what land we seen lays to 


over nine points of the compass, sir.” 

We could see it from the rigging and of its identity there 
was no doubt; the blue loom which lay along the rim of that 
gray waste of sea could be no other than Wetalltok’s land. 

With the water casks hauled up and lashed into their 
cradles we were out of itsoon enough. Before sundown (the 
log read twenty miles) we hove to off the northeastern por- 
tion of the new-found coast. Cautiously sounding, we crept 
through a bottle neck into a small rock-bound harbour. The 
clank and clangour of the anchor chains pouring out through 
the hawse pipes sent flocks of eiders a-whirring round us. A 
long string of geese honked wildly as they flapped awkwardly 
away. A gorgeous silver fox scurried into the crevices of a 
great pile of rocks. 

Up over the moss carpet of a valley, a shallow groove in 
bare rock slopes, I climbed to a vantage-point from which, 
as far as the eye could see, north, south, and west, lay range 
upon range of hills. The valleys between them were moss- 
grown sweeps of tawn and russet strangely like cultivated 


42 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


fields) Among them here and there were the green and 
silver disks of lakes and ponds, and between two distant 
jagged lines lay a long blue tongue of sea. 

Not only in the red bands of marl and shale, and in the 
distant masses of yellow which were quartz sites, and in 
the white-grays which were limestones was the land mass, 
as I had hoped, an extension of the ore-bearing series of the 
mainland. Though it was barely exposed, I stumbled over 
ore itself—rich stuff which lay heavy in my hands! 

But here we were, on the last legs of food and gear, with 
the ship almost broken down. The skipper said she was 
leaking badly, and what with the September gales and snow- 
storms which were near at hand we should be “up and out of 
it, headin’ south with all the sail we has.” For two days, 
however, in which the crew were busy overhauling sailing 
gear and ballasting ship, we made reconnaissances inland and 
south along the coast. We saw the blue rims of more new 
land, all of it made up of the black ribs of eruptives, the 
terra cotta and the red and white and yellow ribbons of 
the Nastapoka rocks. There was no sight of natives but the 
boulder rings of their old camp grounds were everywhere. 

Reluctantly, at daylight of the third day, we put out for 
the south. 

At Great Whale River Post, we received the first news, 
albeit it was two months old, of the great busy world outside. 
We picked up the mouth of the Great Whale too late to get 
in over the river bars to the post. With three of the crew, I 
unlimbered the launch but, confused by the darkness, whilst 
threading through the bars, we were caught by a sweep of 
surf and thrown up upon a narrow spit of sand. Up river, 


‘OULYSy Ue Aq Jlsuad ul UMPIC, 


S Cd Va ING Ee Lan Oe Gis last 








THE BELCHER ISLANDS 43 


a mile and a half away, shone two squares of yellow light, 
windows of one of the cabins of the post. Unable to see 
through the boils of surf, the mate lashed a lantern to a long 
pike pole, and as he waved it to and fro through the air, I 
fired round after round from my Winchester. 

We waited there an hour but there was no response. 
_ Again we signalled, but with the same result. Not until the 
moon rose at midnight did we get clear. When we landed I 
glimpsed several forms flitting past the window lights and 
dissolving in the darkness. Puzzled, we climbed to the cabin 
and strode into a lighted but deserted room. Nearly half 
an hour we waited there, our surprise and curiosity mounting 
the while, when at last the familiar, long, lanky form of old 
Harold stood halting in the doorway. Recognizing me in 
a moment, his fear-beclouded face became wreathed in 


smiles. He reached out for my hand exclaiming, “My God, 
sir, | t’ote you was the Germans!”’ And so it was that we 


first heard of the great World War. 

From Great Whale we sailed on down through James Bay 
and on through ship’s channel into the nine-mile-wide delta 
of the Moose to Moose Factory; here the Laddie was made 
ready for the slipway where, through the winter, the crew 
and half-breed shipwrights of the post were to overhaul her. 
When everything was taken out and her cobble ballast 
thrown overboard, she filled to the engine room and would 
have sunk had it not been for the shoals over which she rode. 


VI 


HE first map of Hudson Bay, published in the year 

1612, was based upon the notes of Hendrik Hudson, 

which were brought out in the year 1611 by the mu- 
tinous crew which cast him adrift to perish from exposure 
and starvation. 

This map, strangely enough, shows three large islands 
lying between 56° and 60°, approximately the latitude of 
Wetalltok’s islands. The identity of these islands was prob- 
lematical and provoked much discussion. Burpee, for in- 
stance, in his chapter on the discovery of the Bay, speaking 
of Hudson’s voyage and chart, says: 


The chart shows several large islands lying off the western coast of 
Hudson’s Bay between 65° and 60°. From Roe’s Welcome in the far 
north to the foot of James Bay only two large islands lie off the western 
coast, Marble Island and Akimiski. The former being out of the ques- 
tion, we are reduced to Akimiski. That convenient island seems to be a 
peg on which to hang every theory of the fourth voyage that defies other 
solution.+ 


Luke Fox, in the summer of 1631, sailed along the eastern 
coast. In about the latitude of the islands shown on Hud- 
son’s chart, he mentions the existence of certain islands, 
which he says Hudson named “Lancaster, his Isles.” No 
trace of this name appears in any of Hudson’s notes. Of 
the size and character of the islands, Fox gave no information. 


1L. J. Burpee: “The Search for the Western Sea,” New York, 1908. 
. 44 


THE BELCHER ISLANDS 45 


They remained a mystery. And then in 1709 they disappear 
altogether from the charts, to be replaced by the depiction 
of island systems outlying the east coast given on the Ad- 
miralty charts—groups of small islands in dotted outline, 
the largest of them not ten miles across. These charts 
are based on the notes and maps of Captain Coats, who from 


1727 to 1751 sailed in and out annually along the east coast 
of Hudson Bay. 


Belchers Islands, four in number, lie forty-five leagues to westward of 
Little Whale River; by another account, only twenty-nine leagues in 
latitude 56° - 6’, where I was entangled three days in ice. 

About seven leagues north from those is a range of islands twenty 
leagues in length, fourteen larger, and many smaller; the middle, in 
58° oo N. Latitude, at a distance of seventeen leagues from the east 
main, amongst which the Usquemows swarm all the summer months to 
catch fish and moulted fowl, in great abundance, upon all these, Belchers 


and Sleeper Islands.1 


Strangely enough—when I last visited Great Whale River 
Coast in the Laddie—this was immediately following the 
first landing on the islands—there had been brought into 
the post, by one of the traders, as a curio from a far outpost 
east of Southern James Bay, an old copy of company corres- 
pondence—letters of Sir George Simpson, Governor of the 
Hudson’s Bay Company, and of his factors on the Bay, dur- 
ing the years 1846 and 1849. These letters contained, be- 
sides routine business matters, a project for sending to 
the Belcher Islands a half-breed servant of the company, 
Thomas Weigand, by name, with Eskimo companions. 


1John Barrow, edit.: “The Geography of Hudson’s Bay: Being the remarks of Captain 
W. Coats,” etc., Hakluyt Soc. Publs., 1st series, London, 1852, vol. II, p. 66. 


46 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


The letters relate how Weigand carried out this project. 
They are, however, altogether concerned with starting a fur 
trade on the Island; none of them ever gives any evidence as 
to either the Island’s character or size. | 

Extracts from a letter from John Spencer, Fort George, 
dated January 8, 1849, to Jos. Gladman, Esq.: 


. At all events he [Thomas Weigand] succeeded to accomplish- 
ing his visit to the Esquimaux Islands having neither met with obstruc- 
tions from ice or shoals and when arrived there he met with the shelter 
and security of an excellent harbour, objects of no trifling consideration 
to the explorers of a strange coast—and although it so happened that 
he saw but few natives and got but little from them it would be highly 
ridiculous in endeavouring to make that appear as a sufficient reason for 
not going again, and that their poverty should for a moment be thought 
sufficient for framing such an idea, an idea in itself as absurd as it 1s 
ridiculous, and could only find shelter in a narrow mind, for after our 
knowledge of those islands, being more or less inhabited, and that those 
natives are living under no other protective hand than that which na- 
ture bestowed upon them, indifferent should we be considered in our 
endeavour towards bettering mankind, were we to show ourselves in- 
different towards them. I think the three first objects above cited are a 
sufficient reason for future enterprise, even chilled as the minds of the 
crew were at the solitude of the place which in itself ought to form but a 
secondary consideration when exploring the regions of so inhospitable a 
portion of the coast—what is it to them whether the ground be covered 
with luxuriant verdure and everything around cheerful and pleasing, or 
for them to find it as they did, provided they are blessed with a good har- 
bour when arrived there, and by concerting measures hereafter who 
knows but the inhabitants of these islands may be brought to 
furnish a valuable portion of trade in Blubber, Foxes, Ivory and what- 
not—all such matters have yet to be tried, and if we cannot succeed it 
will then be time enough to relinquish the thing. At the present mo- 
ment I have no doubt but they view the trip over there with a degree of 
unpleasantry altogether ideal. 


_ THE BELCHER ISLANDS 47 


That this estimable scheme for mutual benefit, however, 
was not to be realized is apparent from the fact that the is- 
lands so soon and so completely drop out of Hudson Bay 
tradition. 

To the present generation of fur traders on the Bay, 
Wetalltok’s tale was a myth, nor did they believe my first 
reports. Among some of the government officials at 
Ottawa, as well, these reports were nothing if not amusing. 
Where I claimed the existence of a great mass of land, they 
pulled out their Admiralty chart and showed me soundings! 





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PART II 
WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS 


5 


TV laa 
"Vid, a 
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WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS 


I 


ES,” said Johnny Miller, the interpreter, when I 

‘ landed at Charlton Island, ‘‘Wetalltok says he’ll go. 

He’s that glad to see his own land once more, sir, 
an’ all his friends an’ relations what he hasn’t laid eyes on 
these twenty years. An’ he tells me, sir, he’s real hungry 
for walrus an’ seal an’ huntin’—he’s all the time talkin’ 
about it. He knows wonderful places for walrus, sir, where 
they almost cover the small rock islands, they is so many. 
An’ he knows where the bear country is, too, sir. He told 
me once how they had to hang things up on a string so 
they dangled in the wind an’ made a noise in order to keep 
the bears from prowlin’ aroun’ their camps. An’ more 
than the huntin’, sir, he do want to show you how big them 
islands is.” 

By nightfall, Wetalltok’s home at Charlton was no more. 
His wife and three children, his two partners, their wives and 
seven children and twenty dogs, kayaks, sledges, tents, and 
hunting gear were aboard the Laddie. Their impedi- 
menta topped the Laddie’s deck load, which was already rail 
high, while among the boxes and bales in the choking hold, 
Wetalltok and his tribe made their temporary home. The 
dogs, chained in the dories which swung from the davits over 


the rails, whined and yelped and chorused to the skies. 
51 


52 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


At nightfall, the fifth day of sailing northward, we sighted 
the southern outliers of Wetalltok’s islands—little “hump- 
backs” of jet with rings of surf around them. On long 
lazy swells the Laddie rolled, aimlessly, with sails aflap. The 
night stole in. We peered through the gloom. All we could 
see was white rings of surf embracing the black shadows that 
were islands. As it was too dark to put out to sea again we 
crept into a six-fathom sounding and paid out fifty fathoms 
of chain in the lee of the nearest shore. Though the sky, 
when all but the watch turned in to sleep, was cloudless and 
crystalled with stars, by midnight, the wind piped wild and 
quick through the rigging. Clouds scudded swiftly through 
the sky. The Laddie’s stern tailed off, not a biscuit’s throw 
from shore. The dogs, drenched by the seas, howled and 
whined, the big round eyes of the women and children peered 
anxiously at us from the hold, while with lanterns we hovy- 
ered around the anchor chains speculating on how long they 
would hold. 

Daylight showed us an island, a lump of rock not much 
larger than the ship itself, all agleam from the spume that 
drove over it. Nowhere was there alanding. The rack and 
retching of the chains as they sawed through the steel eyes of 
the Laddie’s nose, the slosh of the seas that combed us, and 
the boom of the island’s shore was the dirge fifteen hours long 
before Bill bawled out, “The glass is climbin’, sir.’ As 
suddenly as it had come, the gale died down. 

Northwestward, blue wisps of loom that seemed to float 
on the sea were our first glimpse of Wetalltok’s islands. We 
rounded, a few hours on, what proved to be the southeastern 
extremity of the island group. From a narrow winding 


WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS 53 


gutway we came out upon a narrow sound, landless on its 
northern rim. The black forbidding shell of the outer 
crest gave way to cliffs, ribboned by the yellow-gray and terra 
cotta Nastapoka rocks. The lowlands were carpets of tawn 
and russet moss. Wetalltok and his throng had eyes for 
nothing but the game—schools of white whales looping 
through the seas; flock upon flock of eiders winging off be- 
fore us; and geese skimming the profiles of slopes and 
hills, or regiments of them high in the air. 

We found a site for a camp at the head of a snug horse- 
shoe harbour. A noisy stream of fresh water ran into it; the 
head of it was a beach of sand; fine landing for kayaks and 
canoes. The ground around was for the most part smooth 
moss sward. 

We hardly had anchor down when Wetalltok from the 
crow’s-nest called out, “Innuet!”’ and pointed toward the 
sound. An Eskimo in a kayak came paddling toward us. 
Within hailing distance he halted. Wetalltok called out in 
Eskimo, then rapidly he paddled in. Open-mouthed, he 
clambered up over the rail. Speechless, he stood on deck, 
staring and smiling by turns. We had to suspend opera- 
tions whilst Wetalltok and his throng, crowding around him, 
plied him with such a rapid-fire of questions that the big mug 
of tea we had given him grew cold in his hands. | 

By a map he showed us where the main camps of the is- 
lands lay. With him as pilot, Wetalltok, and two of his 
crew, I put off in the launch. Darkness had come before we 
chugged into the gloom of a harbour some twenty miles away 
where on a cobbled shore stood six tents of Eskimos. The 
launch swept in, its rattle reéchoing among the hills. Ex- 


54 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


cited packs of dogs stood howling to the skies; from the tents 
not a soul came forth until Wetalltok called: ‘‘Innuet,” 
‘“‘Chimo,” and an old man haltingly came toward us. 
Wetalltok explained to him who and what we were and in 
a little time a group of natives was gathered around us shak- 


~eo2-]=. 


a PAKERS DOZEN 
bel | ISLANDS 





























Scale of Miles 
10 20 30 3 





GENERAL DRAFTING CO.INC., N.Y. 





MAP OF THE BELCHER ISLANDS 


Showing Mr. Flaherty’s routes about the islands. The Belcher Islands lie in the 
southern part of Hudson Bay, just north of James Bay. 


ing hands and exclaiming their surprise. From hiding 
places amongst the rocks the women and children too came 
down to greet us. Over old times and friends Wetalltok and 
the Eskimos chattered the whole night through. We struck 


WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS ss 


off at daylight for the ship with all the Eskimos the launch 
would hold. Clad in bearskin, dogskin, and eider feathers, 


ant . Cr Phomas Smiths Bof | 










aoe ne 5 Fr Ls dnyls Isle 
At a, cd 4 c Fred | 
Baffins Slee oor | a 
Ba ° wy : 8 ; we 
' \ Py qr 
~ y Pe ‘ t™ '. , rapt of 
a. ota ‘0 
; ‘ Z na 
wes Ye 4 






















> - 
New North y ~Saas A ale ae 
; ™a re ze. i ag 
Wal es ; Cisin fort . Cy re le ae Cursber land ie Mig p —— 
A } Gi, Do 
Hope Adeun y 3 ; the : . ? 
4 ji ea gi 
Es fo ears on 7 omy 
Dre Check sor Bs * ‘ 
» ERS CAintnke = NM ; 
3 Bunous . . ao J 335 gs 
pcg’ ¢ Seuthempton 4 \ 
Bn Bay 
ay ‘ Plan, shield L 





PResolt 
STRAITS 2" 


4 4a ¢ Sart = | 


Wew South 
Wales 


‘harlelon 


A SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MAP OF HUDSON BAY 


Showing, in the oval, the large land masses that apparently were intended tO 
represent the Belcher Islands. Later the Belchers were shown on even the best 
maps in dotted outline as tiny groups of islands. It was not until Mr. Flaherty 
rediscovered them that they were shown in their proper position and proportions. 


they were as primitive looking a lot as I have ever seen. 
Said Salty Bill, regarding their wide-eyed and gaping masks 


56 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 
as we swung in alongside: “‘ Well, sir, some queer fish comes 
in with the tide.” | 

Within a week, kayaks catamaraned, the rifle-cracking 
launch and dories had ferried the Laddie’s cargo to shore to 
where streams of old men, women, and children carried it to 
the building huts, speculating the while as to what each 
box and bale and bundle contained. For hours at a time 
they watched the crew build the kablunak’s big igloo. 
Prizes to them were waste bits of board and bent nails. 

Until the sea ice formed there was a succession of bleak, 
melancholy days with gales of driving sleet and rain. We 
were taken up with work around the base getting our gear 
and equipment in shape, making sledges and bartering for 
dogs for the winter sledging. We made inland journeys over 
the island upon which we lived, and cruises along its coast- 
line, in the hope of locating sufficient driftwood for our 
winter’s fuel. We had counted on getting driftwood but 
nowhere could we find a supply to serve two huts the winter 
through, so on the last open water of the year, we took the 
Laddie across to the Great Whale Coast on the mainland and 
returned with wood, laden to the rails. Of coal, we had some 
four tons, all that was obtainable at Moose Factory, and 
this, with the Laddie’s cargo, I hoped would be enough. | 

With each new face that came drifting in, Wetalltok and 
I pored over maps and listened to what he had to say about 
the islands, and about his own hunting grounds in particular. 
By the number of sleeps it took to travel, we could approxi- 
mate the distance to the point whence he had come. The 
magnitude of the country grew with each new tale. 

With pieces of iron ore, Wetalltok explained to the 


WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS a 


Eskimos that it was these rocks we came to seek. He told 
them how the white man “‘boils’’ these rocks and fashions 
the wonderful knives and guns and spear-heads which they 
hold so dear. He told them how they could tell if the blue 
rocks were iron ore by scratching them with flint, for the 
scratches made red streaks like blood. Several among them 
knew, they thought, where were the sevick (iron) rocks and 
promised to bring in pieces when they came again, which 
would be over the sea ice in winter. 


II 


ECEMBER came in with calm, clear, frosty skies, 
1) raked at night by glorious auroras and lighted by 
day with floods of sunshine. The tiniest lakes 
were soon closed with emerald seals, then the larger in quick 
succession. ‘The white rims of the harbour crept farther and 
farther out from shore, and along the sweeping arc of the 
sound itself a jagged ice edge sparkled in the sun. Within 
two weeks the Laddie had ceased swinging from her chains 
and the seal of winter was everywhere. 

When Christmas came we kept open house for Wetalltok 
and his throng and all the islanders who were camped near 
by. Salty Bill improvised a tree. Spruce boughs, which 
he had brought up from Moose for the purpose of making 
spruce beer, he lashed to a pole. The candles were foot- 
long miners’ dips, and the decorations were brightly labelled 
fruit cans from the cook’s scrap pile. The presents were 
black plug tobacco and matches for the men and needles 
and combs and trade candy for the women and their flocks. 
While Bill acted Santa Claus, Wetalltok’s gramophone 
belched forth its rasping sounds. The lilt of “Tipperary” 
and of Harry Lauder’s songs was contagious, but the 
‘Preacher and the Bear,” with its monologue and the realistic 


growling from a supposed bear, was a knock-out. 


“Nanook! Nanook!” (the bear! the bear!) they ex- 
58 





© REVILLON FPRERES, N-Y- 


TOD KI & 
(The Deer) 


Chief of Sikoslingmuit Eskimos 
Southern Baffin Land 





WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS 59 


claimed, rocking with laughter, but the kiddies, half fright- 
ened, clung to their mothers and rolled their almond eyes. 

When the ceremonies around the tree were over, Bill 
herded the teddy-bear youngsters around the stove and 
popped corn, the most surprising thing by way of food they 
had everseen. “‘Cakeot nucky”’ (the gun food) they called 
it, as enraptured, they watched the kernels popping in the 
air. 

We had, however, to bring to an end the celebrations 
within the overcrowded house, for our nostrils could not be- 
come attuned to the seal odour of their society. We wound 
up the day by playing at nothing less than a game of baseball 
on the harbour ice. It was coated with just enough snow 
to make good ground. The Laddie’s starboard side we used 
as a back-stop. The bleachers were the Laddie’s deck, bul- 
warks, and rigging. If, what with our cumbersome fur 
costumes, the game lacked speed, it did not lack interest for 
the gallery—old men, women, young and old, and squalling 
youngsters—especially if one of their kind was fortunate 
enough to hit the ball, for, as they saw it, the pitcher’s réle 
was to hit the batter! Only darkness stopped us. 

It was the second of January before the first sledges of 
Eskimos came in from out of the mysterious west; strangers, 
they proved to be, who had not heard of our advent on the 
islands. When we had pulled their dogs and ours from a big 
rolling ball of fight, Wetalltok led them indoors, ensconced 
them on the floor, and thrust sea biscuits and big mugs of 
scalding tea into their ready hands. It was a long time be- 
fore we could question them, so lost were they in wonder of 
the kablunak’s igloo, but finally we did extract the informa- 


60 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


tion we had long been waiting for, that everywhere to west- 
ward the sea ice was fit for travel. 

At noon with a thirteen-dog team, Wetalltok, two of the 
crew, and I, struck out for the west. The visitors with their 
dogs and sleds accompanied us to a point less than a sleep 
away where was, they thought, an outcrop of sevick rocks, 
enough to load the kablunak’s ship many, many times. 
They knew that it must be a sevick rock, for like the flesh 
it showed red when they scratched it. 

Winter bared its teeth as we filed over the ice. Wind 
swooped down in gales; it scoured the fields and hills and 
sent clouds of snow smoke whirling through the air. Within 
the day we reached the point where the sevick lay. And 
sevick it proved to be—not only in loose pieces wherever 
were wind-swept patches of bare ground, but in a vein, from 
twenty-five to thirty feet wide, running north and south 
along the coast. Though the coast was veiled in drift, and 
the vein outcropped intermittently, we traced it southward 
for thirty miles, so vividly did the big red band of it stand 
out through the black and white desolation. I was to find 
out before the year was through that it was the richest and 
largest occurrence to be found on all the islands. 

There was no end to the gales and drifting snow. We 
continued northwestward over lakes and ponds and difficult 
boulder-stream ground into the interior. En route, we 
hit the ice of the northern half of Wetalltok’s great lake, 
which he had told me was so large that from the south end 
looking north there was no land, just water, like the sea. 
But as we travelled to its head we could see nothing, for the 
drift was blinding. 


WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS © 61 


A half sleep from Wetalltok’s lake we struck the sea. 
Drift again filled the air. The dogs wailed now and then; 
some of them vomited from the cold. Suddenly they gave 
tongue. Before I knew what had happened, Wetalltok was 
at their head, rifle-cracking his long lash. Beyond him, 
crouching over his snowblind, arms folded on knees and har- 
poon in lap, sat an Eskimo. Through a breathing hole no 
larger than the butt end of his harpoon he was watching for 
seal to rise. Since dawn, Wetalltok said, he had been wait- 
ing there. As quietly as may be we détoured and in a mo- 
ment the drift had swallowed him. 

By nightfall we picked up the orange square of an igloo’s 
lighted window. It was the igloo of one Rainbow. Nota 
seal had he killed for eight days, said he. All that he had 
to live on was sea pigeons, from an open tidal pool near by. 
Just before we arrived he had killed one—the first in two days 
—and his wife, who was plucking it, held it up for me to see. 
Though they knew that I had little or nothing in the way of 
food to give away, their own troubles were forgotten in the 
concern for the visitor who had come among them. While 
Rainbow helped Wetalltok with the dogs out-of-doors, the 
good wife hustled here and there putting to rights her igloo’s 
disarray. She sent her daughters scurrying out-of-doors 
for a pail of clean tea-water snow, while she unrolled my 
sleeping bag, pulled off my kooletah, and laid it over her 
feebly burning lamp so that it would be warm by morning. 
Nor did she allow her children, while we ate our beans and 
bacon, to hover around, for fear it would prove embar- 
rassing. When they saw me crawl in to sleep, they spoke in 
whispers. I dozed off to the hiss of driving snow and the 


62 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


low sounds of their speculations as to when the seals would 
come. 

I told Rainbow, as we made ready to leave, to come into 
the base when I got back, and I would try to be hospitable 
and kind, and, “Yes,”’ added Wetalltok, ‘“‘be sure you keep 
one eye open for the sevick rocks as youcome.” Rainbow 
said he would—that is, if he ever killed another seal; and 
there was a chorus of laughter. 

For hours two sundogs, slashed by rainbows which rose 
straight up from the sea, fanked the sun. The snow smoke 
was like lace drawn by some giant hand over the black knobs 
of hills and the folds and wrinkles of the satin plains. But 
the glory of the day was short. By three o’clock the sun 
was smothered by the snow. When I mentioned igloo, 
Wetalltok said, “Ouki,” and pointed with his whip stock to 
a snow slope far ahead.. As my eyes followed his direction, 
I saw, nested together like so many hives, a village of snow 
houses. 

In the first igloo into which I crawled was the wreck of an 
old man; his kindly face, seamed and weather-scarred, had 
two shining dots for eyes. ‘‘There is no more hunting for 
me,” he lamented, and pointed to his legs which were bent 
and twisted by some disease. His daughter, no more than a 
girl, followed us in. Abashed by our gaze she furiously 
shook the snow powder from her furs. ‘“‘She does the hunt- 
ing for this old man,” Wetalltok explained. ‘Every day 
with the old man of the igloo adjoining she goes on the 
ice after seals. Every night for ten days she says they have 
been coming home with sledges empty—they have not even 
seal oil for their lamps. A salmon, now and then, which the 


WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS 63 


old women catch in the ponds near by, is all the food they 
have.” But they all forgot their troubles in their delight at 
seeing us. Wetalltok and they, with one of my flickering 
candles and the kablunak’s good tea twice boiled between 
them, yarned half the night through. 

For two days we crawled over the mouths of deep bays 
and in-draughts of the island’s south coast. Valueless days 
for reconnaissance, however, for impenetrable drift still drove 
through the air. 

The glimpse of showers of sparks which a chimney vomited 
to the gale told us that at last we were home. Ina moment 
more I was standing before the crackling stove, rubbing 
cheeks, ears, and nose, which felt as if they were made of 
parchment and burning warm. 

Until midnight, to the tune of the drift lashing the cabin 
walls and the wailing of the wind among the eaves, we talked. 
“Tis the land of the gales, sir,” said Salty Bill. ‘“‘In the last 
nine days you has been gone but one day come clear. In 
the cracker last night, rifle shots woke me. "Twas the big 
provision tent strippin’ to pieces. An’ these winds makes it 
hard for the huskies, sir. Every time there is a knockin’ on 
the door I knows that one of them is on the other side an’ 
with ‘kopunga’ (hungry), on his lips. They says there is 
no seals, save out in the rough ice, an’ they’re not venturin’ 
there now for fear of bein’ swept tosea. Tis the rare salmon 
or two what pulls them through, sir, an’ what little grub I 
has been givin’ ’em. 

“But we’ve got to close down on dolin’ out more grub, 
for ’tis meltin’ away. I have to ration Wetalltok’s family 
in the hut now, for the huskies has been hangin’ around an’ 


64 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


of course, sir, husky fashion, they just had to share with them 
until themselves went hungry.” 

Wetalltok looked worried when he came in the next morn- 
ing. He gave me to understand that he was not going to 
keep on living off my dwindling supply of food, but was going 
to take his family and go afield with the others. When I 
told him that he couldn’t be spared, he begged for one of the 
teams and rations for ten days. He left the following morn- 
ing, saying he was not coming back without seal. | 


III 


HE gales and cold kept on; the last of the big mili- 
tary tents housing our food and gear was stripped 
intoribbons. One black night we were awakened by 
the pandemonium of fighting dogs. “Tookalook’s old master 
dog was chewing at a big sealed tin of bully beef, tearing 
it open, strips of tin jammed between his bleeding fangs. 
Old boots, whips, or harness, and even a pup (Tookalook lost 
three in as many days) were delicacies for them these times. 
On the twelfth day was ended the biggest drifter of the 
year. The cabin was snowed up to the roof—the dogs 
scampered over it. Wetalltok’s hut was completely buried; 
a shaft straight down through the snow marked its entrance. 
The forlorn Laddie was drifted bulwarks high. 

“We may get good weather now,” was old Tookalook’s 
observation as he scanned the brick-red sunset and pointed 
to the stars outcropping above it inthe steely sky. ‘“‘Wetall- 
tok, I think, will now get his chance for seals.’ Bill and I 
were long since busy with supper-making when old Tooka- 
look popped his head in through the door and asked me for 
my “big eye”’ (telescope), saying that Wetalltok’s wife from 
the lookout hill saw the black specks of a team coming in to- 
ward us. Tookalook wondered if by some rare fortune it 
could be Wetalltok. | 

It was not long before the din of knocking brought us out- 


of-doors te where on the lookout every man, woman, and 
65 


66 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


child stood watching intently the slowly moving black forms 
of an approaching team. Wetalltok it was, they thought, 
but as to whether he was coming loaded or empty, they could 
not yet tell. The gloom thickened and the sledge crawled 
like a snail. I went indoors for a moment for the ship’s big 
glass, when suddenly the wild exclamation “Netsuk!” re- | 
sounded through the air. 

““Wetalltok it is, sir,” said Bill, “‘an’ what’s more he’s 
bringin’ home the seals.” 

“How many?” I asked as Wetalltok waded through the 
crowd toward us. 

“Timietow,”’ said he, holding up ten fingers. 

The babel of some forty dogs shattered the peace and 
quiet of the first calm night in many days. Around Wetall- 
tok, his young son, and Tookalook, the dogs, just out of 
reach of Wetalltok’s cracking whip, circled belly-down, like 
the wolves they were. Their eyes, reflecting the lantern 
light, shone like bolts of fire. Their muzzles were white 
with froth of hunger. Constantly, Wetalltok kept cracking 
his whip around their circle, a dread lash with which he could 
split an ear or cut clear through their tough hides. But one 
or another would attempt a desperate sally for the seal meat 
which old Tookalook was portioning. They were too intent 
to fight save when some poor devil was caught by Wetalltok’s 
lash. The pain of it would send him bounding straight in the 
air, or maddened beyond all control he would bury his fangs 
in the unfortunate nearest him. When Bill and I turned 
toward camp the dogs were sleeping and Wetalltok and his 
tribe had crawled into the feast of the warmth-giving seal 
for which they had waited so long. 





i 








x 


HUNT 








ns 






ay 
=e 

Ag = 
eel 





WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS 67 


There were no hungry hordes of hangers-on about the hut 
from this time on, for everywhere, Wetalltok said, the big ice 
had been broken by the gale, and seal meat was in plenty 
in the encampments of the islanders. 7 

By the middle of March the days grew long and warm. 
Cottony clouds sailed through a sky resplendently blue. 
There were glorious days of sledging. We made in one day 
distances that had required three. 

Toward the end of May, Wetalltok and I, storm-bound 
on a rocky point some thirty miles from camp, were awak- 
ened one wild night by the boom and grind and milling of the 
big ice tumbling before a southeast gale. When daylight 
came the threads of the outer coast were broken by gigantic 
rafts of ice. Beyond them stood smoking sea. There had 
been sleet and snow and rain for two days past, and the 
snow-covered ice that lay between us and the camp was like 
a sponge charged with water. Here and there were pools 
so deep that the dogs swam, the sledge floated, and we, fol- 
lowing after, waded through depths above the knee. By 
dark, camp was reached. We soaked in its good red heat. 

For a fortnight Bill had been over-hauling the little 
Nastapoka—the self-same craft, the reader will remember, 
with which I made the first attempt to reach Wetalltok’s 
islands. Upon her I depended for the summer cruises 
around the island and for the last trip down the bay toward 
the railway frontier. For the Laddie, since only Bill re- 
mained of her crew (the others had been sent across to the 
mainland), had been abandoned. In fact, her bulwarks, 
yards, masts, and arms had been broken up two months 
before to supply the deficiency in our fuel. | 


68 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


June came in with days long and gloriously warm. House- 
flies buzzed over the sunlit panes of our windows. Bumble- 
bees hovered among the mosses. Young would-be hunters 
with miniature bows and arrows stalked for yellowlegs, and 
aimed mockingly at the flocks of geese that came sailing 
overhead. Wetalltok, old Tookalook, and their families 
squatted by their kayak frames, put on fresh sealskin covers, 
while Bill worked upon the Nastapoka, which stood by. 

Hunting-gear and summer clothes had long since been 
made. The Nastapoka stood ready to slide into the sea. 
On the memorable seventeenth of June we were awakened by 
a strangely familiar sound. It was the wash of surf. 


IV 


IS a wind-ridden land, sir, and no mistake,” said 

Salty, as we crawled into our diminutive cabin for 

an hour’s sleep. The Nastapoka rolled and heaved 

at the end of her chains. For three days the drive of sleet 

and rain resounded like blasts of sand on our cabin roof and 

walls. The only breaks in its monotony were wild squalls, 

strong enough, though we rode under bare poles, to heel us 
over. 

“Yes, sir,” said Bill, continuing, “‘now I minds how we 
looked forward to the breaking up, and how when it came 
our uncivil times would be over, sir. But here we are, sir, 
ten days from camp and the log on the lean side of fifty 
miles.” After a rumble of oaths that would have made a 
bloody pirate feel at home, Bill dozed off to sleep. 

We bowled out the next morning, and over big wallops of 
seas, sailing close-hauled along the main south coast into the 
west. We crossed the mouths of bays and in-draughts so 
deep that their inland shores were thin lines, gray-blue. As 
in winter, we only bee-lined from point to point as the 
weather willed, cruising, however, strips of coast which the 
sledge trip had not touched. 

At the last north camp of islanders, first among the 
swarms of kayakers who scooted out to where we were slip- 
ping anchor in the harbour was old Mukpollo, his Billiken 
mask smiling welcome. ‘‘Walrus there are,” said he, after 

69 


70 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


we had “‘chimoed,” shaken hands, and given him some black 
plug tobacco for a pipe that, upside down, poked out from his 
lips. ‘‘My own eyes have seen them,” said he, “‘a whole is- 
land of them. And my!’’—as his eyes swept the Nastapoka’s 
decks—“‘but you have the fine omiak for getting them.” 

But “‘How far is it?”’ was our first question. 

“Oh, not far,” said he, and he pointed northeastward over 
open sea. His idea of “not far,” it turned out, was a long 
day’s kayaking; but the picture he painted, as only an 
Eskimo can where game is involved, decided us. Mukpollo 
came aboard at dawn—every man of the encampment clam- 
oured to come, too—and with his kayak slung up on deck 
we sailed away. , 

At sundown we picked up the half-round rock of a small 
island which the log said stood forty miles at sea. A rookery 
it proved to be, as we crawled close in; over it like pin-points 
in the sky, as black and thick as flies, swarms of sea pigeons 
rose in panic. We were looking for a landing amongst the 
windings of its cobbled shores when suddenly we sagged in 
the trough of a big ground swell; the Nastapoka struck, and 
the sea that followed swung us in upon a nest of reefs. Bill 
jumped into the surf with a line around his middle, and half 
swam, half tumbled to land. Scrambling up to a huge 
boulder he wrapped around the line. But in less time than 
it takes to tell, the Nastapoka, her bottom broken, was slosh- 
ing full, and everything that was floatable rose out of the 
hatchways and drifted in to shore. 

Gloomily enough we surveyed the hulk—which, half sub- 
merged, rocked to and fro in the lazy ground swell—and the 
wreckage that we had laid out before us on the rocks; 


WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS av 


blankets outspread to dry, a side of bacon, sugar now turning 
to syrup, and a dripping bag of tea. We made a roaring 
driftwood fire and while we stood around it waiting for the 
steaming clothes we wore to dry, we munched sodden sea 
biscuit and gulped scalding tea and discussed pro and con 
just what was best to do. 

Our only means of transport, I pointed out, were the kayak 
and our canoe. “And yes,” said Bill, “some sixty miles of 
sea to use them in.” But Mukpollo said there were four 
small islands, albeit they were surf-bound, strung along the 
way to the nearest point of the main coast. He mapped 
them in the sand, and then, leading up to the island’s crest, 
pointed to the gray dot of the first of them which appeared 
to be about fifteen miles away. 

“Well, sir,” said Bill, turning from one of the gloomy sur- 
veys of the Nastapoka’s corpse swinging among the rocks, 
“if I could find me a decent size o’ driftwood, sir, I wants one 
try at salvagin’ before we leaves.” And though he led a 
hope forlorn I gave in. 

He and Mukpollo came back within an hour carrying on 
their shoulders a log of driftwood that for these latitudes was 
surprisingly large. “‘’Tis a lucky find, sir,” said Bill as he 
threw it down. ‘“There’s ne’er one more like it on the 1s- 
land,” and I caught a gleam of hope in his eye. He un- 
folded his plan. “The log is what we calls the Spanish 
winch, sir,”’ said he, “‘and when I makes it we’ll have the 
Nastapoka, if the weather holds, up on dry land.” 

“But look here, Bill,’ said I, “there are holes in the 
Nastapoka that you or I could crawl in.” 

“T minds that, sir, but with canvas patches we’ll tar them 


72 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


and patch her over, and I think, sir, they’ll see us to the 
camp.” 

Willingly enough we started in. Bill first ran a line from 
the Nastapoka in two hundred feet on shore to a narrow crack 
in aledge of rock. In the crack he inserted the flukes of two 
anchors. In the round of the anchor flukes he shoved the 
driftwood log which, after infinite pains, Mukpollo and he 
with hunting knives had made fairly smooth. Around the 
log he took two turns of the line which led to the Nastapoka’s 
nose, and with chains we took half turns in the ends of the 
winching log and, inserting stakes, began winding. 

Hour after hour the winding kept on, to the tune of Bill’s 
creaking Spanish winch, the slosh of surf flowing in and out 
the Nastapoka’s wounds, and Bill’s “She comes, me byes, 
she comes.” ‘There were aching backs and blistered hands 
for every foot we gained. On the morning of the third day 
Bill pointed to lowering clouds banked out in the west. 
“Tf there is a cracker in them,” said he, “‘there’ll be nothing 
left us but the Nastapoka’s bones.” But the “cracker” 
kept away, and inch by inch the Nastapoka came. By night- 
fall she was safe. 

Bill’s plan, however, of patching her temporarily with 
tarred canvas was not so successful. In one place her plank- 
ing for four feet in length and one and a half feet in width, 
and the ribs that supported them, were gone. So three of 
us, at dawn of the first calm day, struck out in the canoe for 
camp, a hop-skip-and-jump, as it were, between the surf- 
bound islands that intervened. Within seven days we 
were back again with extra oakum, tar, and tools, and six 
lengths of precious board, which, since every scrap of wood 


WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS 73 


about the camp had long ago been used up for fuel, we had 
to rip from the walls themselves. In three weeks the Nasta- 
poka again was launched, but a more patched and bandaged 
craft never rode the seas. With relays of the crew bailing 
the while, Bill finally shoved her battered nose into the mill 
pond of camp harbour. 

By the first of August our iron ore expeditions were, as far 
as circumstances would permit, complete. We had found, 
all told, five ranges lying east and west from one another, an 
average of six miles apart, and extending north and south a 
distance of thirty miles. The extent of iron-ore-bearing 
rocks actually outcropping was more than one hundred 
square miles. 

Two of my crew had left by sledge in early January for the 
mainland, to proceed thence southward along the coast and 
overland to the line, taking with them plans of deposits, and, 
for analysis, samples of the ore. They were to return with 
a party of Sir William’s engineers who were to report upon 
the commerciability of what we had found. 

After weeks of waiting, shouts of ““Omiak! Omiak!”’ rang 
through the air, and a York boat wing-and-wing came bowl- 
ing up the Sound. The engineers en route since the first of 
June were my own father, who, wearing a two-months- 
old-growth of beard, I hardly recognized; Doctor Moore, 
geologist, and W. H. Howard, surveyor, who besides claim- 
surveying was to make astronomical observations for the 
still skeptical government at Ottawa. I shall never forget 
my difficulties that memorable day trying to play host and 
read the while the long year’s mail. | 

Within a fortnight the ore examinations were complete, 


74. MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


and the visitors sailed out for Great Whale River on the 
mainland, at which point they were to reach the fur ship 
when it called in southward bound. At Moose Factory, 
they were to await the coming of Bill and myself on the 
Nastapoka, then by canoe we would all journey together up 
river to the rail frontier. 

Since the Nastapoka could carry only our food, instru- 
ments, and personal gear, I divided the hut and its furnish- 
ings among Wetalltok, Tookalook, Mukpollo, and their 
families. There was everything—dishes, an old mirror, old 
magazines, powder, caps, and cartridges, knives, axes, old 
clothing, cloth, and old shoes. As a special payment the 
gramophone and records went to Calla, our cook; a rifle to 
Mukpollo; the canoe to Tookalook, and to Wetalltok our 
poor old pianola, much scarred and stained and out of tune 
from rough transport and misuse. But to Wetalltok it was 
the most wonderful thing in all the world—‘‘big box with 
the many insides!” 

On the thirteenth of September, with the Nastapoka deep 
Jaden with our personal gear, films, instruments, and food 
—Bill and I said our last good-byes . . . regretfully 
enough pulled up anchor, the crowd on shore gloomily watch- 
ing us, and sailed out through the harbour past the old 
Laddie’s stranded hulk, and on into the Sound. Wetalltok, 
old Tookalook, and Mukpollo followed us for a while, waving 
as they ran along the shore. 


I received some letters a year later from Great Whale 
River, dated three months before, and in them was news of 
Wetalltok’s islands. Rainbow had gone mad, the result of 





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© REVILLON FRERES -N_Y. ROBERT U. FLAHERTY. F RG Ss 
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(Shining Water) 


Stkoslingmuit Eskimo Woman 
Southern Baffin Land 


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WINTER ON WETALLTOK’S ISLANDS 725 


starvation. For many days he had been at large with the 
Winchester and cartridges that I had given him, spreading 
terror among the islanders. To save themselves they had 
had to kill him. 

Poor old Tookalook, in less than a month of my departure 
had dared the crossing to the Great Whale Coast in the canoe 
I had given him, and his kayak, catamaraned. Big winds 
had caught him. The canoe had been found, bottom up, on 
the mainland shore. 

A letter from good old Mavor, the factor at Great Whale, 
read: 


Perhaps you will remember having given your pianola to Wetalltok 
just before you left the Belcher Islands last fall. Well, Wetalltok was 
stuck with that pianola on his hands; he couldn’t take it into his igloo, 
and he couldn’t live in your cabin for he had, of course, no fuel. So he 
conceived the idea of sledging that pianola over to me—it seemed that 
you told him I would be keen to buy it—but how he could transport a 
full-size pianola over eighty-five miles of sea ice, and some of it rafted 
mighty high at that, was more than I could see, but he did it—brought it 
right into Great Whale Post, only to find that I wasn’t there, for I had 
been transferred in the fall, south to Fort George (186 miles away). 
So he kept on down the coast having obtained supplies from the factor 
on the strength of the sale of the pianola to me, and after the Lord knows 
how many days, he came sledging in one day at nightfall, right into my 
post yard, with a “Chimo” and a “Here, Angarooka, is the box with 
the many insides.” The thing worked, you’ll be surprised to hear, 
though some of its notes were what Wetalltok called “sick sounds”! 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Flaherty, R. J.: “The Belcher Islands of Hudson Bay: Their Dis- 
covery and Exploration,” Geog. Review, vol. V, no. 66, pp. 433-58, 1918. 
Moore, E. S., “The Iron Formation on the Belcher Islands, Hudson 


76 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


Bay, with Special Reference to its Origin and its Associated Algal Lime- 
stone,” Four. of Geol., vol. XXVI, pp. 412-38, 1918. 

“Tron Formation on Belcher Islands, Hudson Bay,” with Special 
Reference to its Origin and its Associated Algal Limestone,” Bull. of the 
Geol. Soc. of Am., vol. XXIX, p. go (abstract only), 1918. 

“Iron Deposits on the Belcher Islands, Hudson Bay,” Monthly Bull. 
of the Can. Min. Inst., no. 82, Feb., 1919, pp. 196-206, 191g. 

“Ore Deposits of Arctic Canada,” Eng. and Min. Jour., vol. CX, pp. 
306-400, 1920. 

Woodbridge, D. E., “Iron-Ore Deposits on Belcher Islands,” Eng. 
and Min. Four., vol. CXII, pp. 251-54, 1921. 

“Tron-Bearing Rock of Belcher Islands, Hudson Bay,” by G. A. 
Young, Canadian Geol. Survey, 1922. 


PART III 
EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 





EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 


HIS narrative begins at Great Whale River on that 
memorable night in March, 1912, when, as the reader 
may remember, one Pitchalock came to old Harold’s 
hut with the news that the icefields over which for months 
I had been planning to cross to Wetalltok’s islands had been 
broken by the gales. The failure to get to Wetalltok’s is- 
lands in the diminutive Nastapoka, the five months’ long 
wait for the sea ice to form, and then this freak break-up of 
the ice, knocked all my plans to pieces. There was left me 
out of the wreckage, however, one plan that I had long hoped 
to carry through. This was an exploration of the interior 
of northern Ungava.' 
This interior was the largest unexplored area remaining on 
the mainland of northern Canada. The map of it was a 
blank. Low speaks of it as follows: 


There still remains about 120,000 square miles of the northern portion 
of the peninsula between Hudson and Ungava bays, totally unknown to 
any one except the wandering bands of Eskimos who occasionally pene- 
trate inland from the coast.” 


1Robert J. Flaherty: “Two Traverses Across Ungava Peninsula, Labrador,” Geo- 
graphical Review, vol. VI, no. 2, August, 1918 (American Geographical Society, New York). 

Previous explorations of the Labrador Peninsula lay to southward through the Indian 
country. The northernmost started from Richmond Gulf, and following the Clearwater, 
the Larch and the Koksoak Rivers, was first taken by Doctor Mendry in 1824 for the 
Hudson’s Bay Company. Doctor Mendry’s expedition is the basis for Ballantyne’s 
famous boys’ story, “Ungava.’” Low made the same crossing in 1896 and mapped and 
geologically explored the country. 


79 


80 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


At only one point had the interior been penetrated. This 
was when Low himself, sledging in some forty-five miles 
from the coast of Hudson Bay, discovered and explored the 
course of Kasiagaluk, the Great Seal Lake of the Eskimos, 
until the starving condition of his dogs forced him to retreat. 
Of Kasiagaluk, which he called Lake Minto, Low speaks 
as follows: 


Kasiagaluk or Lake Minto is one of the largest lakes of the Labrador 
Peninsula, being according to the Eskimos, upwards of one hundred 
miles long.! 


With the exception of Low’s fragmentary map of Kasiaga- 
luk and his route thither, all other details of lakes and streams, 
as shown on all the maps, were merely copies of maps made 
by the Eskimos. What Low had seen was merely the be- 
ginning. How big was Kasiagaluk—how big its discharge, 
the mysterious river which wound down the peninsula’s far 
slope to Ungava Bay? And all this was but one thread of 
a maze of waterways hidden in the silences of what seemed 
to me then illimitable barrens of the great peninsula! 

Besides, there was the west coast of Ungava Bay to ex- 
plore for iron ore. Along this coast, much of it shown on 
the maps as nothing but a dotted line, I might intersect an 
extension of the inaccessible iron ore series long since known 
to exist along the lower reaches of the Koksoak, some two 
hundred miles southward. Indeed, to find an iron ore series 
similar to those on the Nastapokas and such as I hoped to 
find on the Belcher Islands, was the object of the undertaking. 

1See A. P. Low: “Report on Explorations in the Labrador Peninsula along the East 


Main, Koksoak, Hamilton, Manicuagan and Portions of Other Rivers in 1892—93—94- 
95,” Report L of Annual Rept. Geol. Survey of Canada, vol. VIII for 1895, Ottawa, 1896. 


EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA | 81 


With old Harold and Nero I discussed ways and means. 
The distance from Great Whale north a hundred and fifty 
miles to White Whale Point, thence inland across the great 
interior to what Nero called the eastern sea (Ungava Bay) 
was roughly, as we should wind, seven hundred miles—not a 
great distance, as Nero pointed out, for sea coast travel; but 
inland where “‘him, no seal, no tooktoo, no nothing,” a more 
dificult matter. “Since I am small boy,’ Nero went on, 
“deer, him all same gone.”’ Meaning that the vast herds 
of countless thousands that once wandered through the 
illimitable barrens were now no more. “Dogs, him 
starve,’ said Nero, referring to his journey with Low, inland 
to the great lake, Kasegaleek, and eastward along its coast, 
until the starving condition of the dogs forced them to re- 
treat to the sea. 

For food we must depend entirely upon the supply we 
could carry on our sledges. Nero would be unable to go 
with me all the way. His wife refused, in the face of the 
utmost of the fur trade blandishment and all that I could 
offer, to let him be gone on so long a journey. We did, 
however, arrange that he should accompany us as far inland 
as he had travelled. This point, the one he had made with 
Low, we estimated to be one fourth of the total journey from 
sea tosea. When we reached this point I would cull the best 
dogs from both teams, and take on the additional supplies 
from Nero’s sledge, leaving enough to see Nero back to the 
coast. | 

Harold’s negotiations for two men were protracted. One, 
Omarolluk, who, though a newcomer at Great Whale, had 
already won for himself a reputation as a hunter and a 


82 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


sledging man, was, Harold considered, the man most desir- 
able for the trip. His wife, too, kept him for several days in 
a state of indecision. Harold finally won her over by assur- 
ing her that she and hers would live on rations at the post 
during Omarolluk’s absence, and to clinch the bargain gave 
her a silk bandanna, some beads, and sweeties for her young- 
sters. To Omarolluk, however, the angarooka’s food and 
the princely wage, eighty-five beavers a month (almost 
three times the post wage)—inducements such as I should 
have relied upon—were of small moment. But Harold’s 
picture of the big deer-killing in spring where the great deer 
migrations ford the Koksoak River inland from Ungava 
Bay, which he, Omarolluk, would take part in, provided 
that we accomplished the journey, proved to be the winning 
card. 

Omarolluk secured, Harold swung into line for him a sledg- 
ing partner, Wetunik by name, whose principal stock in 
trade I later found was his smiling disposition and his 
penchant for the angarooka’s good nucky. 

Finally our food supply was checked and overhauled. 
This was done on the trade-shop floor for the benefit of 
Omarolluk and Wetunik, who by dint of hefting—weights 
and measures being of course unknown to them—were 
finally made satisfied, jubilant in fact, over what they 
felt sure was a good and sufficient outfit. 

At break of day we started. Harold ran up the flag. 
Omarolluk’s long whip cracked through the air. The howl- 
ing din of the dogs stopped suddenly. They lunged ahead. 
The sledges rocked like ships at sea behind the multitude of 
their galloping heels. The waving throngs, the drift-swept 





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EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA _ 83 


cabins, the flag, ironed out against the stark steel sky, soon 
dropped behind the shoulder of an intervening hill. 

Our journey along the coast was familiar ground. Here 
and there we encamped with old friends, deeply interested, 
all of them, in the prospects of our long journey. The 
kindly souls gave us their best advice of the country inland 
as far as they in the old deer-hunting days had wandered. 
All was easy travelling until we came to the rough ice off Gulf 
Hazard. Here Nero’s sledge from a pressure ridge some 
twenty feet high pitched over a sheer wall of ice. One of its 
two-inch plank runners was broken clean across the grain. 
We retreated a dozen miles to the encampment of one Jim 
Crow. With him we bartered for a new sledge. Much 
scurrying on the part of Nero from the sledge owner’s camp 
to mine and back again, more times than I have the patience 
totell. ‘Jim Crow, him say yes, all right, your paper [order] 
to Koksoak angarooka. ‘Tobaccomik, sweetieloo, him 
plenty; only now him want matches and maybe bead his 
baby.” And so it went on, until finally Nero’s blandly smil- 
ing mask, poking itself through my camp door, announced 
that “Jim Crow, him full.” The order that my numb 
fingers made out on Great Whale Post resembled somewhat 
the inventory of a Woolworth store. 

Nero was made much of by his admiring fellows, not only 
as my valet de chambre (God save the mark!) but did he not 
know all the intricacies of the white man’s tongue so that he 
could satisfy them upon all the points upon which they 
were curious—my safety razor, my gun, my kit of medicines 
which Nero warned them were not meant for food, and the 
thermometer? I kept night and morning records. As I 


84 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


crawled out at nightfall and hung the thermometer upon the 
point of a harpoon sticking in the snow, a throng gathered 
around me. Nero was called upon to explain. When he 
had concluded he translated for my benefit. “I 
tell ’em,” said he, ‘“when white string [the mercury] go up 
over hole [zero on the scale] everything all same water, but 
him go down under hole, she’s all ice.” Omarolluk, how- 
ever, looked doubtful. He kept looking at the tiny ther- 
mometer swaying in the wind, and then out upon the miles 
of frozen sea. For the life of me I could not understand why 
he was so puzzled. Said Nero by way of explanation: 
“Omarolluk say, your little thing can’t do, only cold make 
all that ice.” 

We were not long out from Jim Crow’s camp when we 
again entered rough ice at Gulf Hazard. On all the thousand 
miles of coast of Hudson Bay there is no ice so dangerous, 
for here, through a mere slot through huge lumps of hills, 
discharge the waters of Richmond Gulf, in a long, writhing 
tongue that cleaves its way over two miles straight out to sea. 
We were forced to détour eight miles from land, and even 
here Nero, testing the ice with his harpoon, drove it through. 
“Him Adelite [Indian] name, ‘qua qua chickawan,’”’ said 
Nero. ‘‘She mean,” he explained, “Shim swallow quick.’” 

The next day, though it was distant thirty miles, we 
picked up the smoke of Nastapoka Falls twisting in the 
sky—the landmark we had long been looking for. From it 
we were to strike inland across the big interior. In the 
seven days we had been journeying along the coast, not a 
seal had been killed. All we had in the way of fresh meat 
was some fifty pounds of blubber for the dogs’ diet of corn- 


EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 8 


meal. And now, Nero reminded us, we were leaving the 
sea and the life-sustaining seal it held. He wondered if it 
were not better to camp until a seal kill had been made and 
feed up our not over-thriving dogs for the big trip ahead; but 
this might mean several days’ delay. Anyway, concluded 
Nero, if the dogs did not pick up we might camp on one of 
the lakes of the interior and cut down through the ice on a 
chance for fish. Marked by a monument of cobblestones, 
we left a cache of rations sufficient to help Nero on his return, 
and ourselves as well, if by any chance we had to retreat. 

With Nero’s team in the lead, we swung up the long steep 
slopes of the coastal range, whose seared and wrinkled crest 
loomed above us in the eastern sky. We climbed into stiff 
winds as that memorable day wore on. Whirlpools and 
eddies of snow came racing around and through us as they 
birled toward the big wide void of sea. The western sky 
was red before we reached a respite from the climb, a plateau 
that led us over a miniature cobbled plain to a deep gulf 
among the hills. With a last long look over the sea below, 
and with a “Good-bye seals!” from Nero, we were soon 
buried in the ranges. 

During the next four fae we covered less than thirty 
miles, for we were lost most of the time, so confusing were the 
slots and grooves of valleys through which we travelled. 
Nero would have to climb to lookouts and signal to us, the 
handful of dots strung out in some pocket far below him, 
the course to follow. We often toiled only to find our valley 
a blind, at its end a sheer wall facing us. And then to work 
out of it meant both teams and ourselves harnessed to a 
single sledge. 


86 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


Along the coast driftwood had been our fuel. Now all we 
could depend upon was an occasional stunted tree that grew 
in some deeper wind-sheltered pocket of the hills. As we 
worked into the ranges even these disappeared. All that 
was left us were the creeping willows and trailing spruces 
that, with snowshoes as shovels, and on hands and knees, we 
burrowed for. 

But the fifth day the hills around us changed to long, curv- 
ing slopes, with shallow saucers of valleys between them. 
The valleys, moreover, inclined toward the east, which meant 
(said Nero) that we had reached the point where the water 
“him go Ungava Bay.” 

Toward nightfall we reached the crest of the last big hill. 
To eastward, far below us, lay miles and miles of snow- 
smoking plain, the chaotic face of it sprinkled with multi- 
tudes of boulders which stood out of the satiny waste like 
pin points of jet. The blur of horizon was broken here and 
there by solitary hills. While we gazed and debated upon 
what valley to descend, the snow smoke settled down and 
the middle distance resolved itself into paralleling threads 
that wound and twisted around a sweep of ice whose far 
horizon was a landless rim—the ice, said Nero, of Kasegaleek, 
the great seal lake of the Eskimos. 

For four days we continued eastward over the ice of 
Kasegaleek. The only break in the monotony of low, bar- 
ren granite shores was the skeleton of a tepee frame—a gaunt 
silhouette against the sky—an old camp of Indians who used 
to come here in the few short weeks of summer from their 
own hunting grounds within the limit of trees, far southward. 
At another place Nero pointed out the spot where, when he 


EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA § 87 


was a boy, his father had made a deer kill—so many, said 
he, that it had taken three days to cut them up. Here as 
everywhere through the great interior, Nero continued, 
the Eskimos used to come in from the coast in the early 
spring, on the watch for migrations as they worked north 
from the Indian’s land of trees. Sometimes there were so 
many that if one put his ear to the ground he could hear 
them. “Him sound like thunder, very; but now,’ la- 
mented Nero, “‘deer, him gone. Huskie—him starve.” 

He spoke of three families who, several winters before, had 
struck out from the Koksoak across the interior for Hudson 
Bay—‘‘Nobody see ’um no more.” 

Over the winding arms and bays of Kasegaleek, on the 
evening of the fourth day we came to the point which Nero 
said marked the lake’s halfway. This was, as we had 
arranged, the place where Nero and his team would turn back, 
being the extreme point to which we could economically 
continue with both teams. We took stock of our supplies and 
dogs. As to the supplies we had no concern, but the teams 
were failing. They must get red meat. Nero proposed that 
Omarolluk and he take three days off, deer-hunting in the 
hills inland, while Wetunik cut down in theice forfish. But 
three days of hunting and four holes through seven feet of ice 
failed to yield us the meat of which the dogs stood so much 
‘in need. 

Notwithstanding the situation, Omarolluk and Wetunik 
were willing enough to continue. Omarolluk argued that, 
though the team were lean and impoverished, the last three 
days of inaction had rested them; moreover, the worst of the 
going—the coastal ranges—was over, and from now on, 


88 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


through Kasegaleek and down the unknown river to the 
sea, would be the easiest going of the journey. Not only 
that, but there would be always the chance for fish wherever 
a rapid might be open; then surely somewhere along its long 
winding course we must come across the trail of some little 
band of deer. Of the twenty-three dogs available Omarolluk 
culled thirteen and took all the food supply from Nero’s 
sledge, save enough to enable Nero to return to Great Whale. 
Through the early hours of our last night together we sewed 
boots and broken gear and mended harness, with specula- 
tions now and then as to the character of the country that 
lay ahead. With Nero’s help I retouched my vocabulary, 
for the extent of my Eskimo was such as “ Make the fire,” 
“Which way is the wind?” and those most-used phrases of 
all, “I am hungry” and “‘Is it far?” 

At daylight Nero struck out for distant Great Whale and 
Omarolluk, Wetunik and I for Ungava Bay. We had acold, 
hard day’s work of it; then, at camping time, that which we 
had taken for the lake’s main body we found to be nothing 
but a long bay, and the head of it a \barrier of steep granite 
hills. Through all the following day, as drifting and as cold, 
we retraced our steps, camping at nightfall on the spot 
where we had taken leave of Nero two days before. 

For three days we continued northeast over Kasegaleek, 
across the mouths of multitudes of mysterious bays that led 
God knows where, through flocks of rocks of islands, over 
long traverses and through narrows in steep granite hills. 
And everywhere the rims of frozen lake and the profiles of 
the ranges were blurred by the smoking snow. We lost 
hours, huddled for shelter within the sledge-load’s lee, wait- 


EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 89 


ing while Omarolluk scouted among the hills. The sleeping 
dogs were often drifted over before he signalled his three 
shots for us to come on. 

On the evening of the fourth day, rime, spiralling in the 
acid air, and the vivid green of an open rapid, marked 
Kasegaleek’s end and the beginning of an unknown river’s 
long career tosea. “Here is the place for fish,” thought I, as 
we drew up alongside, “with nothing like the cutting of 
seven-foot holes through Kasegaleek’s thick hide to stand in 


¢ 


the way.” Omarolluk thought so too; so we camped near by. 

A day we spent trolling and watching, spears in hand, but 
not a sign of fish did we see. There were constant reminders 
of the hunger of the team. They fought like demons over 
their corn meal and tallow. With whips and snowshoes and 
clubs we kept them from annihilating one poor brute that 
for two days past had been slowly breaking. Omarolluk 
shook his head as he swept a hand across its ribs. 

For three days we slowly followed the loops and turns of 
theriver. There was but one interest, a covey of ptarmigan, 
the first life we had seen all the way in from Hudson Bay. 
We came upon them so suddenly that there was no time to 
use a gun. Whip in hand, Omarolluk crept toward them. 
The whip trailed out behind him. Foot by foot he ap- 
proached. The covey broke. Forward like a shot the 
long six-fathom lash flashed through the air. The covey 
flew up and sailed over the shoulder of a hill—but where 
Omarolluk’s lash had flattened out lay a ptarmigan, dead 
upon the snow. 

The trough-like valley of the river deepened as we went 
on, with big flanks of granite hills rising steeply at either 


90 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


‘hand. The stunted trees that wound in a straggling line 
along their forefeet emphasized the chaotic desolation that 
loomed above them. Now and then the bluster of March 
winds blocked out the hills and the view ahead, and 
forced us to fall, groping, close in to shore. There were bad 
breaks, too, in the slow-going underfoot, giving way at one 
never-to-be-forgotten point to a frozen rapid nine miles long. 
Sheer walls on either hand forced us into troughs, deep pits 
and gouges. The rough-and-tumble played out the dogs. 
When Omarolluk and Wetunik returned from a fruitless day’s 
search for deer, hardly one of them had energy enough left 
to break out from its blanket of drifted snow. Their day 
and night’s rest did them little good, for when we started on 
the journey once more we could hardly urge them on. The 
leader, at one time the jauntiest dog we had, finally lay down 
and refused to rise, but whined and licked her aching paws 
when we drew near. Omarolluk unharnessed her, and she 
rode lashed aboard the sledge. 

Constantly our eyes roved for signs of game, scanning the 
nooks and crannies of the drift-swept hills and the grooves of 
valleys that among them wound down to the river’s shore, 
and among the straggling clumps of spectral trees; but on 
all that hopelessness of white and gray all that lived and 
breathed and moved were our own black dots, bending 
slowly over the loops and curves of that endless stream. 

The day deepened toa gloom of gray. The drift thickened 
before a rising wind. Omarolluk halted the team. Stand- 
ing up on the sledge load he scanned the shoreline for signs 
of camping ground. Suddenly he jumped down. On his 
hands and knees he began brushing away the newly drifted 











a A a me gt 


Bok IMO HUNTING US CENES 


As sketched by Wetalltok. The upper two sketches show two hunters and their dogs 
approaching seals on the ice. ‘The next lower drawings show hunters creeping up on 
caribou. The lower sketch shows the end of a successful seal hunt. 





EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA gi 


snow. He beckoned me near. ‘Fresh deer tracks!’’ cried 
he, “‘and not far from here.’ By pantomime he made me 
understand that they were sure to be yarded in some deep 
valley among the hills. Telling Wetunik and me to keep 
on to the first good camping ground, he unlashed his rifle and 
struck out westward across the river. Ina moment he was 
swallowed by the drift, bent on what seemed to me a hope 
forlorn. Wetunik and I camped a mile onward within the 
meagre shelter of some stumps of trees. The dogs fed their 
lean ration, and our meal of beans and bacon and tea cooked 
and eaten, we waited through the long hours of the night, to 
the tune of the soughing wind among the trees and the com- 
plaining whines of the hungry team. 

Sometime in the monotony of it all we fell asleep. The 
dogs, frantic with excitement, wakened us. The while we 
rubbed our eyes came the crunching of Omarolluk’s steps. I 
reached out for the stove—for that Omarolluk was cold and 
hungry was all that entered my mind—when the door opened 
and he crawled in. His face was wreathed in smiles. 

“Tooktoo,” said he, and advanced his three fingers before 
our incredulous eyes. Whilst we plied him with beans and 
sea-biscuit and scalding tea, he pantomimed his story with 
all the details of the hunt. None of us had any thought of 
sleep. As soon as the team could be harnessed he and 
Wetunik struck out to bring in the kill. It was long after 
daylight before they came back; and though one of the team 
had been killed by his fellows at the feast, two happier and 
more contented mortals than Wetunik and Omarolluk were 
never seen. All through the day and night that followed 
they gorged and slept, and gorged again. 


II 


ITH a spanking team before us, lunging and eager 

WV to get on, we made miles in one day that had 

taken two before. There were flocks of ptarmigan 
here and there among the stunted willows along the banks. 
At one lunch ground a whisky-jack hopped around us while 
we dined, begging for all the bacon rinds and biscuit crumbs 
we could spare. 

Each new bend of the river led off to wider and longer 
sweeps, and the ranges grew in grandeur at either hand. 
At one point we came to the mouth of a large tributary 
stream—an artery leading through what labryinths of rivers, 
lakes, and streams into regions mysteriously far, even the 
oldest of the present generation of Eskimos do not know. 

As the sun gained in strength the snow became scintillat- 
ing like the dust of powdered diamonds. It raised havoc 
with our eyes, in spite of goggles. For two days Wetunik’s 
eyes were altogether blind. All of one day he rode full length 
on the sledge, shielding them with folded arms. 

We had hardly settled into our stride for the journey one 
bright blue morning, when Omarolluk halted the team and 
pointed to a terrace of-marine gravel plastered like a railway 
grading, high up among the hills. ‘‘We are near the 
sea, said he. With every mile the river valley widened 
and the hills became still more bold. Reaches of river 
opened up, beyond which we could see the blue haze of far- 

92 


EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA § 93 


off shores. The days were glorious—blue skies and wads of 
cotton for clouds, and what wind there was, warm and soft, 
carried spring in its arms. On the tenth of April we came 
face to face with a gigantic pile of rafted ice. ‘“‘Tiahoke— 
the sea!”’ exclaimed the men. The ice, however, seemed im- 
passable, but so were the beetling shores which hemmed us 
in. For three days we climbed and tumbled and chopped 
and wriggled our way through it. We fed the dogs on 
frozen beans and sacrificed our grub boxes for fuel enough to 
boil tea. As the tides buoyed it up and down, the groaning 
and rifle-cracking of the ice upon which we slept resounded 
the long nights through. 

When morning came, we climbed the highest ice on the 
lookout for a course beyond the welter of stuff that lay 
ahead. What we saw was open water in the distance, and 
floes packing with the wind. Up and over the shoreline, 
which now, however, was not so steep, was the only way. 
We climbed the hill in stages never more than two hundred 
feet at a time. The dogs almost played out before we 
reached the crest, but Omarolluk, going ahead some hundred 
feet, would lie down on the flat of his back and with his 
hands and legs moving erratically in the air, imitate the 
flippers of a basking seal. As Nero would put it, “Dogs, 
him come.” 

Six hundred feet above the sea, a vast panorama lay out- 
spread below us, the blue and white of Ungava Bay some 
thirty miles away,in the middle-ground the tangled skein of 
the shorelines of Leaf Gulf. There were islands of strangely 
familiarform, table-topped, grotesquely slanting, as if they 
were about to topple into the sea. “‘Kokrak, tiamitow!”’ 


94 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS | 


(they are like the islands of the Great Whale coast) ex- 
claimed Omarolluk; and so they were, the formations identi- 
cal with the iron-bearing formations of the Nastapoka and 
Belcher islands—the link I had hoped to find between Low’s 
discoveries of the interior some hundred miles southward 
and his later discoveries three hundred miles northward 
on Ungava Bay. 

We coasted down to sea, two miles of it, the team gallop- 
ing in wild career, frantic lest our ponderous sledge overrun 
their flying heels. Across the gulf we crawled, through deep 
snow almost molten in the warm rays of the April sun. By 
nightfall we reached the gulf’s east coast. Some hundred 
miles now intervened between us and our journey’s end; but 
the route thither was overland, for the coast of Ungava Bay, 
owing to its enormous tides, is impassable. We knew that 
there must bea sledge route to Fort Chimo. This Omarolluk 
was most anxious to find; otherwise we might spend several 
days in reconnaissance. We spent hours cross-sectioning 
likely places where were old camp signs, often on hands and 
' knees brushing away a mantle of newly fallen snow. But 
no sledge tracks could we discover. 

When morning broke, soft and warm, we were up early 
and breakfasting on bannock, tea, and beans, wondering the 
while what the day’s work would bring, when we heard the 
startling sound of voices—‘‘Chimo—o! chimo—o!”? Two 
old women came toward us, waddling like penguins through 
the snow. Thinking we were Eskimos from somewhere 
northward along the Ungava coast, not until they were 
close up did they realize their mistake. Astonishment held 
them in their tracks. Exclaiming over and over their 


EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 95 


wonder and surprise, haltingly they came into the camp. 
Omarolluk gave them big mugs of tea and sea biscuit. Soon 
we were like old friends. What palavering then went on! 
“Yes,” they said in answer to the one question uppermost in 
Omarolluk’s and Wetalltok’s minds, “the big tooktoo [deer] 
hunt is on; even now they are migrating across the Kok- 
soak, and yes, many of them, herds and herds—like the 
boulders upon land.’”’ When we struck out the men’s faces 
beamed at the prospect which to them was the climax to our 
journey. 

It was up hill and down dale to Fort Chimo, over ribs of 
bare rock hills, winding through boulder-strewn valleys, and 
across small, solitary disks of lakes, or over chains of them 
strung out like beads among the folds of hills. We breasted 
a drifter the second day out, so thick we could hardly 
make out the leader of the team. Wetunik, his leg lamed 
the day before, followed limping behind the slow-moving 
sledge. Near camp time we reached the crest of a long, 
steep hill. The dogs broke into galloping; the sledge shot 
after them down through the drift-filled air. When we 
reached level ground, the sledge ahead and the yelping dogs 
ploughing after, no Wetunik could we see. Crawling into 
the lee of the sledge load we huddled for shelter and waited 
for him to come on. Minutes dragged into hours. At in- 
tervals Omarolluk fired the usual three rounds from his Win- 
chester into the blanket of driving snow. It was useless to 
double back on the trail, which now was blotted by the drift. 
Darkness crowded through the storm; and, knowing that the 
least of Wetunik’s portion was a meagre shelter behind some 
~ boulder or an improvised cavern in the snow, gloomily we 


96 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


made camp, crawled into our bags, and sank into sleep. 
Daylight had hardly come when the crunch of footsteps 
wakened us. Sheepishly Wetunik trudged into camp. 
Chagrin underlay his smiling mask as he explained, between 
gobbles of biscuit and gulps of tea, that he had spent the 
night just beyond a hill not a mile away. 

Our last day broke calm and warm and clear. By noon we 
picked up some solitary trees. “Fort Chimo,” said Omarol- 
luk as he eyed them, “is near.”” Even the dogs seemed to 
know what the end of this long-desired day would bring. 
The long fan of their traces never sagged. We ran into 
the fresh trail of some post team. Amid a din of howl- 
ing, the dogs lunged ahead. We came to a break in the 
level void of plain, and the great Koksoak came into view. 
On its farthest shore stood out Fort Chimo—rows of 
white cabins, from whose windows the evening sun re- 
flected bolts of fire which shone like bloodspots on the 
snow. 

The factor, his apprentice, and I had hardly finished break- 
fasting the following morning, when the post interpreter 
knocked on the door and announced that Omarolluk was 
most anxious to see me. ‘“‘He says, sir,” the interpreter be- 
gan, when I had joined them, “that what he wants for you 
to know 1s about them deer; how he only killed three; and 
now, sir, he wants to give you an account of them other two 
deer. First he knowed, sir he says, is when he stalked them 
deer where they was yarded from the storm. On account 
of the storm he gets close up on them and a-crawlin’ through 
the snow, and then he aims at what is easy hittin’, sir; but 
his bullets goes wide—the first up and over and the next 


EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN -UNGAVA § 97 


low, cuttin’ through the snow. Twas only luck, sir, what 
made him get even three deer, and mighty glad he was he 
got "em, sir—for what happened was this: you handed 
him the wrong cartridges, the t’irty-t’irty’s, which as you 
knows, sir, is too loose for a Winchester t’ree-o-t’ree.”” 


III 


HE glamour of the post and the hospitality their ad- 

miring friends heaped upon them were not to stand in 
the way of the great hunt Omarolluk and Wetunik 

had looked forward to so long. One day a score of Eskimos 


came into the post, their sledges piled high with the carcasses 
of deer from the big kill up on the Koksoak. That was 
enough. Within the day they were off on the deer hunt of 
their lives. During the fortnight they were gone I returned 
with the post driver and team and explored the iron ore for- 
mation find we had made on Leaf Gulf. My exploration, 
handicapped by the rapidly melting ice and snow, was 
without result. Further exploration, for a possible extension 
of the iron ore formation northward of Leaf Gulf, had to be 
left until open water. 

Followed a long month of inaction waiting for the break- 
up. The old weather prophets of the post said they had 
never seen the winter last so long. For days the mile-wide 
expanse of river ice, though rotten enough to keep us from 
trips afield, showed no sign of breaking. ‘To scan and specu- 
late over its drab gray mass was the beginning and end of 
every day. The days dragged on. We had almost given 
up talking break-up, when an Eskimo, his shouts resounding, 
came running to our door. Servants, Eskimos, and Indians 
were gathering along the banks while a lookout from the 
cross trees of the post’s flag mast pointed toward the river’s 

98 





© Revillon Freres 


Nica 





EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 99 


far bend downstream. With our glasses we made out a long 
blue lane of open water, and pans of ice slowly twisting and 
turning and sailing away. Then for two days a tumultuous 
army floated by—miles and miles of ice, raftering and rear- 
ing and overriding as it fought its way to sea. 

On the heels of the ice came Indians in canoes from their 
“land of little sticks” —swampy Crees from the far southwest 
over toward Hudson Bay, and Nascopies from as far the 
other way, the Atlantic slope of Labrador. Unlike the more 
prosaic and more sophisticated Crees, the Nascopies were a 
wild and primitive throng. Their whitish tan deerskin leg- 
gings and capotes were set off in the geometric Nascopie 
designs of vivid red and blue. Tall and lank and straight as 
the straightest tree, they strode with swinging hips, their 
heads held high—finely chiselled masks almost buried in 
their shoulder-long hair. The Crees, whom through the 
interpreter I approached for information as to a route by 
canoe for my return to Hudson Bay, said that even now 
there was bad going upstream—an ice jam two days away 
and behind it miles of floating ice. 

To make a long story short, I abandoned my long-laid 
plan of returning with Omarolluk and Wetunik by canoe to 
the Great Whale coast; for the short summer would be half 
over before I reached it, and there would be no time left to 
attempt another crossing to Wetalltok’s islands. Reluc- 
tantly enough we made our separate plans: Omarolluk and 
Wetunik to return to their anxious wives at Great Whale, 
and myself with Fort Chimo Eskimos to strike off northward 
through new country. The post people, the servants, the 
Crees, the Nascopies, and the Eskimos crowded about the 


100 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


landing to see Omarolluk and Wetunik go—Wetunik with 
his beloved bob-tailed dog (one of the staunchest of our team) 
crouched in the bow, then Omarolluk with a young boy of 
eight years before him, whom he explained to me he had 
adopted since his wife gave him none but girls, settled in the 
stern. As admiring friends began calling out farewell, they 
dug down into their pockets and fetched forth what seemed 
to be two balls of red cotton rags. Impressively they un- 
wound them; and when some yard or more of cotton had been 
reeled off, what lay in their hands were two trade watches 
which I had given them as presents the day before. ‘Ah!” 
said everyone. Of course they could not tell the time, but 
carefully they compared them to see that they agreed; then 
more carefully still wrapped their treasures up, waved to us 
with their paddles, and shoved off. 

Eskimo hunters coming up river by kayak reported the 
coast ice-free—an ice condition in Ungava Bay as early as 
the Koksoak was late. This turn of fortune opened up a 
new and more interesting plan, a traverse of the peninsula 
northward of the one I had just completed from Ungava Bay 
to Hudson Bay. *This traverse would open up a representa- 
tive section of the unexplored area remaining. 

Overnight I decided upon the attempt. The little post of 
Fort Chimo hummed (if a fur post ever can hum) with active 
preparations. The factors of both posts, Hudson’s Bay and 
Revillon’s, vied with one another to help with the outfitting. 
The Hudson’s Bay people gave me one Nuckey, their best 
man, and Nawri, and young Ahegeek, son of old Ahe- 
geek, who was chief of his tribe, and Ambrose, son of the Dog 
Woman. From trade canvas secured from Revillon’s a 


EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA io1 


native seamstress fashioned a fly-proof tent, sewing every 
seam of it with the sinew of a deer. My food supply 
—beans, bacon, dried fruit, jerked deer meat, sugar, tobacco, 
and tea—was estimated to be sufficient to last the five of us 
two months. The canoe was a huge Peterboro, twenty-five 
feet long, capable of a load of forty-five hundred pounds— 
one that the Revillon factor had imported some years before 
for a party of Nascopie packeteers for use in the big rapids of 
the Koksoak. ‘The Indians, however, refused to use it. A 
‘“‘man-killer,” they called it, too heavy for the portages; so 
for years it had lain idle in the loft of the fur post. It was 
just the kind of craft we needed, however; big enough to 
weather the seas along the hundreds of miles of sea coast we 
must travel. 

Curious Crees and long-haired Nascopies; fur-clad Es- 
kimos and post half-breeds in capotes and scarlet sashes; 
servants, wives, babes, and children, stood at the edge of the 
banks. Farewells were soon over. The Indians shook with 
laughter when Nuckey and his three men, bearing the “‘ man- 
killer’? on their shoulders, passed them by. We climbed 
aboard the Walrus, a diminutive sloop of open hold and 
twenty-nine feet of keel. She was already loaded rails down 
—four Eskimo hunters, their wives and children and dogs, 
and a yelping litter of pups. Within two hours we were 
standing out on the glass calm of Ungava Bay. Through 
the gray twilight of the night we drifted aimlessly with 
the tide, all but the helmsman, Nuckey, the nest of puppies, 
and myself stretched out asleep on deck or in the hold. 

For two days we sailed slowly along before light catspaws 
of wind, the hunters scooting like water bugs in their kayaks 


102 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


ahead of us, on the alert for seal. The coast was low, deso- 
late—long fangs of points reaching for miles out to sea; 
flocks of bare rock islands, and over them gigantic blocks of 
sea ice, gleaming white and green, lying stranded by the 
enormous fall of tide. When the tide flooded in (a rise of 
forty feet) the islands were erased from view and the blocks 
of ice floated willy-nilly on the sea. On the third day low 
clouds came scudding out of the east, where an ice blink 
loomed in the sky. “Seeco—the ice,” said Nuckey, 
and we altered our course toward land. Great white lumps 
of bergs, resplendent in the ethereal light of the low-hanging 
sun, came sailing in majestically with the ice pack from sea. 
Before the day was over we were prisoners on a small, high 
rock of island. The ice raftered in a gigantic ring around 
us. For three days gales of wind blew out of the east, 
until 1t seemed that the ice from all the North Atlantic, the 
boom and slosh and rasp of it resounding, was crowding in. 

When the gale died down, the sea was a solid mass of ice; 
but soon the ebb and flow of tide opened lanes that wound 
like ribbons through it. Through them we made our way, 
the kayaks signalling where to follow. Often a day’s jour- 
neying, winding as we did, covered but a few miles as the 
crow flies. Often we were caught on some bleak little island 
and held prisoners there for days on end. 

Finally we reached the wide, open arms of Payne Bay. At 
the head of it, where the Payne debouches over a multitude 
of boulder channels to the sea, the Walrus reached her jour- 
neysend. Here all hands debarked, and camp was made on 
shore amid a confusion of sea-drenched garments outspread 
on boulders to dry. Within two days the women’s work of 


EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 103 


mending boots and garments, and our work of repairing out- 
fit and going over food, were done, and the “‘man-killer’ 
stood loaded and waiting offshore. Then came the last 
farewells among the good friends around. They climbed to 
the hills and watched us until we were buried in the winding 
of the unknown stream. 

A splendid river is the Payne, larger than the Gatineau of 
the Ottawa River system in Lower Canada.’ Enchanting 
pictures were the great terrace-strung slopes at either hand, 
towering hundreds of feet above us. Here and there were 
white streaks and bridal veils of torrents cascading down. 
The narrow level plains along the river’s edge were carpeted 
with tan and russet mosses, and flowers purple, white, and 
yellow—solid banks of colour, with bees and butterflies 
among them. Haunting it was and mysteriously beautiful 


in the ethereal light of those low northern suns. 
There never was a more happy or carefree crew than we 


five. Banter, smiles, and laughter were our stock in trade. 
Day and night to us were almost the same, and there was no 
watch to space them. We ate and slept when we willed. | 
One day as we sailed along with a light draft of wind be- 
hind us Nawri, in an astonished voice, suddenly called: 
“Tnnuet! Innuet!’ For the moment I could hardly be- 
lieve my eyes, for an Eskimo in this place, of all places, was 
the last thing I dreamed of seeing. Where Nawri pointed I 
made out a kayak quickly scooting out from shore to an is- 
land rock. As we drew nearer we saw the kayaker peering 


? 


1The Payne was named by Low when he explored its mouth during his exploration of the 
west coast of Ungava Bay in 1898. (See A. P. Low: Report on an Exploration of Part of 
the South Shore of Hudson Strait and of Ungava Bay, Report L of Annual Rept. Geol. 
Survey of Canada, vol. XI for 1898, Ottawa, 1901.) 


104 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


at us from behind a screen of boulders on the island’s crest. 
At shouting range Nawri called “Chimo.” He stood up 
then and in a queer tremulous voice answered. It was plain 
he did not know what to make of us; but soon, reassured, he 
paddled alongside and became quite happy when the men 
explained our presence. As we neared his encampment he 
called out to his huddled family, jokingly, something about 
the Adelite (Indian) coming. For even to this day is the 
Indian dreaded. This native, whose name was Gwack, to- 
gether with his family, a grown-up son, two wives, a grand- 
mother, some half-dozen small children, an army of dogs, 
and a tame sea gull tied by a thong, was living on the Arctic 
salmon resources of the river near by. A plentiful supply, 
cleaned and split, was spread about on the ground curing 
in the sun. 

The one dependable source of food supply for the natives 
who travel the interior in summer is fish, particularly the 
namaycush, the great lake trout, and a finer-eating fish does 
not exist. We caught them up to four feet in length with 
cod hooks, baited with pork and red flannel, so easily that 
we had no occasion to use our nets during the entire journey. 

Nawri mentioned that Gwack was a Great Whale River 
Eskimo and that he had through the preceding months of 
winter hunted his way to the Payne with dogs and sledge 
through the waterways of the interior. From Great Whale 
River to this point seemed to me a hazardous journey, as he 
would have to take circuitous courses and fish through the 
ice for food. Far journeys have been made by criminal 
Eskimos, fleeing from the vengeance of their fellows, and 
Gwack’s presence here, a hundred miles beyond the habita- 


EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 105 


tion of his people, seemed strongly indicative of something 
irregular. Nor did he look at all incapable of it. He was 
bald to the ears—the only bald native I have ever seen— 
which, combined with his sinister, weather-scarred mask, 
made him not a prepossessing object. | 

Ten days on from Gwack’s encampment, ice lay stranded 
along either shore—a sure sign that there was ice still re- 
maining in the big lakes of the interior. We came to where 
the river divided. The southern fork, the larger, is the out- 
let of the great lake, Teeseriuk. Said Nawri: “If there is 
ice in the lakes before us, in the great Teeseriuk we shall be 
sure to find more of it—enough, perhaps, to block our way; 
whereas [tracing a map of both forks in the sand before him] 
if we ascend the northern fork we shall probably find the 
lakes both small and shoal, and consequently find less ice.” 
I was keenly disappointed not to descend the lower fork, for 
Teeseriuk, if what the Eskimos who have one time hunted 
there say is true, is a vast body of water, the largest in all 
Ungava—“‘four days’ fast kayaking,” said Nawri, “before 
one sees the western end. The waves when the wind blows 
hard are big, almost like the sea, and too, in winter the ice 
rafts and fissures like the tiahoke seeco [sea ice.]” That 
Teeseriuk is probably one of the great lakes of northeastern 
Canada I have no doubt. 

Ice or no ice, what we did encounter in the ascent of the 
north fork could hardly have been more difficult. The 
stream, narrowing to nothing more than a V-shaped trough, 
was for miles on end a white race of water. Our tracking 
ground was a treacherous surface of ten-foot banks of ice 
that had been stranded alongshore by the fall of the river 


106 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


following the break-up some few weeks before. Three 
tracked the “‘man-killer”’ while Nawri, standing in the stern, 
worked her nose around the shoals and boulders and blocks 
of stranded ice. There was one rapid draw so swift that 
Nawri and I had to bend with the men to the tracking-line, 
whilst the ‘‘man-killer,” awash to her gunwales, came on by 
inches. 

For three days we toiled. We had begun to believe that 
the white water would never end. Came the swiftest 
stretch of all. We were almost over it, when our stout seal- 
skin tracking-line, catching against a sharp-edged boulder, 
snapped in two. The “man-killer,” with our all in all in- 
side her, swung broadside on and went off galloping down- 
stream. Pell-mell we raced along the ice banks. Coming 
to where the river doubled around a point, Nawri jumped in 
to his waist, and balancing himself with his paddle, barely 
caught the dangling end of the tracking-line as the “‘man- 
killer’’ swept by. | 

Larger and larger were the banks of winter snow. They 
enhanced the melancholy of the boulder-strewn hills and 
plains. Finally we came into a region where the river be- 
came nothing but short links to multitudes of lakes and 
lonely, God-forsaken ponds, so shoal that one could almost 
wade across them. The colourless, long-sloped country 
around them matched their tone of leaden gray. Often we 
launched out from some toilsome portage upon what we felt 
sure was a paddle of at least an hour’s length, only to find 
ourselves out on shore again within a mile. On the seven- 
teenth of July we reached the point where our one-time for- 
midable stream was nothing but a frothing creek. Said 


Ulaf{NG eadn5 fo ow 


IySJ Jlnweeaealy 


Co Sco Bis in Siren 


S°O°H 4 °ALMSHVI4 eC LYseoHe ‘XA N°S3uNaNs NOIMAsY © 
: 


7 >a a ae 





No 





EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 107 


Nawri: “We are near the height of land. My father used 
to say that the Eskimos from the western sea [Hudson Bay] 
came in here where these rivers begin; so the river they as- 
cended cannot be far away.” 

We decided in the morning to go off in different directions, 
each of us on the lookout for the beginning of a river that 
would lead us down to Hudson Bay. 

While we were pitching camp, thick lowering banks of 
cloud, that all day long had been slowly gathering in the sky 
and hanging low over the gloom of valleys and far-off hills, 
began twisting in the rising wind. Loons, far and near, 
called out wildly as they flew like rockets through the air. 
The wind grew stronger. It scattered our precious supper 
fire to the four points of the compass; and then, like regi- 
ments, came walls of rain. We crawled supperless into 
camp. There was no let-up through the night. When we 
wakened in the morning, thick wet snow was flying through 
the air. For the next two days we were prisoners within the 
cramped, flapping shelter of the tent. Cold water and sea 
biscuit was our food, for the moss, sole source of fuel, was 
sodden through. The moss-carpeted ground under us was 
like a sponge, and there was no heat to dry wet clothes and 
blankets; but as ever the crew were full of jokes and banter. | 

On the third day the storm was gone, and a soft yellow 
sun from low down in the north enwrapped the snow-swept 
hills and plain. By overturning large boulders we secured 
great armfuls of moss. In the open end, over a fireplace 
of cobblestones, we took turns at blowing the flame which 
must be constantly fed, since the moss burned almost as 
rapidly as paper. The smoke, pungent as that of burn- 


108 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


ing rags, filled our dripping eyes; but, though the moss 
smoke had strongly flavoured them, we had warmed our 
beans and boiled our beloved tea. ) 

All through the next day we scouted through wet, ankle- 
deep snow for signs of aroute. At nightfall, as Nuckey and 
I were tramping back toward camp, we fell in with Nawri, 
who was carrying the weathered blade of an old kayak paddle. 
He knew by the shape of it, he said, that it was the fragment 
of a paddle used by the Eskimos from Hudson Bay. He 
came to their old camp signs too, he continued, by the 
bank of a westward-flowing stream. If we portaged down, 
he was sure we would come to the little lake-beginning of 
the route we desired so much to find. For two days we 
portaged on, over soft, yielding mossy ground where our 
steps weighed like lead, and over acres of big, close-packed 
boulders. We made two trips on every portage—one with 
the outfit (the loads ranged from 150 to Nawri’s 250 pounds) 
and one with the well-named “man-killer,’ which came 
belly-up on the aching shoulders of the crew. The third 
day, launched on a man-sized stream, we were whipping our 
paddles toward the western sea. The boulder-strewn deso- 
lation of the height of land gave way to higher and higher 
hills. The tawn and russet mosses of the spoons of valleys 
that lay between shone like velvet in the soft yellow of the 
sun. Everywhere were old camp. signs of deer-hunting 
Eskimos of generations gone by. We saw old deer trails, 
worn in the solid bed-rock, where countless thousands must 
have passed, and near them boulder blinds where the hunters 
had lain in wait for them; and at one point, as we swung into 
a new bend of stream, I saw what seemed to be a herd of 


EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA og 


grazing deer. They were merely decoys—two big boulders, 
the small one atop the large, spread out on the distant plain. 

Lakes innumerable, large and small, linked our ever- 
growing stream. On the larger lakes, choked as they were 
with islands, the outlets took hours of paddling and climbing 
into the hills to find. One day we swept, tumbling over a 
mile-long canyon, into the arms of another and im- 
pressively larger stream. There were fewer but larger lakes 
from now on—one lake so long that its far horizon was a 
faint blue line. It was still half-filled with the winter’s 
ice, but we could always pick out some blue lane to follow 
through. There was now no longer the melancholy gloom 
of lowering skies. The purple, white, and yellow banks of 
flowers, the gray knobs of hills, the russet sweeps of plain, 
and the green emerald of the great river, were vibrant in the 
air. Fish—great, red-fleshed trout, sometimes more than 
four feet long—we caught whenever we wanted them. 
Winds from the east followed unfailingly, and where the 
glorious river ran white we could usually jump the “man- 
killer” through, two or three miles of it sometimes, the wind 
cutting our faces, the white-and-black bottom of sand and 
boulders a blur as we sped by. 

By the receded sea beaches along the river banks and the 
appearance of clumps of stunted willows, we knew when we 
were nearing Hudson Bay. The higher hills we often 
climbed for a view of it, but gleaming loops of river were all 
that we could see. The first day of August at noon we left 
the wallowing seas of a big lake expansion and slipped into 
the shelter of its outlet, the river. Within a mile the river 
broke into heavy rapids. Once over the draw, like a shot 


110 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


the “man-killer” was drawn down. Came shouts and yells 
from the bowsman. The crew joined in. Were we trapped, 
about to ride to eternity over the brink of some giant fall? 
More wildly they yelled; they paddled like madmen. Swim- 
ming down the rapid was a half-grown goose. What a race 
between that God-forsaken gosling and the frenzied crew! 
The ‘“man-killer,” swinging broadside-on, came within an 
ace of filling. By the time we had swung her round we had 
shot from the rapid’s tail into a still, clear pool. We were 
laughing still over the goose chase, when Nawri pointed to 
some sea-weed near shore. We glided slowly around a 
point. Before uslay thesea. We tasted the water to make 
sure. 

We struck north along the coast. Before the hour was 
out we saw the last of the great Povungnituk, one of the 
greatest rivers in all Labrador.1. Within ten miles we found 
what we had hoped for—the topeks of some Eskimos. 
Scurrying figures, obviously apprising their occupants of our 
arrival, were sharply silhouetted against the sky. They 
disappeared as we drew near. Only the dogs crawled about, 
ot lay asleep on the ground. Inquiringly I turned to Nawri. 
‘‘Innuet immaitame,” he replied (the custom of the people). 
“Innuet ho ho!” he called out, as the “‘man-killer” grounded 
on the beach. Embarrassingly long was the interval that 
followed before a tent flap flew open and an old Eskimo, rub- 
bing his eyes, came slowly out. Every tent door opened 
then, and men, women, babes, and children were soon crowd- 
ing around us. We pitched camp amongst them, and gave 
iid Lea poten is nearly equal to the Ottawa, the largest tributary of the St. Lawrence 


(See Report on Exploration of East Coast of Hudson Bay, A. P. Low, Volume XIII, for 
1900, Ottawa, 1902.) 


_ EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 111 


them tobaccomik and tea. They shared with us berries, 
salmon freshly killed and the eggs of eiders. On the floor of 
the largest topek I spread out my map of the coast of Hudson 
Bay and they traced with their fingers and told us where we 
might find driftwood and where there might be camps of 
Eskimos. What pleased us most of all was their assurance 
that there was no more ice—everywhere the coast was clear. 

Northward along the desolate boulder-strewn waste of 
low-lying country; across the mouths of narrow, deep, 
winding bays; and in amongst small rocks of islands, we 
made our way. When we pitched camp at nightfall we 
found, as the friendly Eskimos had said, enough driftwood 
for fire—the first real warm fire since far-off Ungava Bay. 
We hovered round it half through the night. Morning 
came, calm, clear, and so warm that we had no mind for 
paddling. The seals kept bobbing up around us, and there 
were schools of white whales playing near the shoals offshore, 
and school after school of steel and silver salmon scurrying 
from under our canoe. The crew were like a crowd of boys, 
bubbling with excitement, exclaiming their ‘“‘ayee’s”’ as 
these golden treasures passed by. All day long we half 
paddled, half drifted, on the overwhelming blue of the sea 
around us—blue and still asthe sky. The paralleling thread 
of coastline fell away. The nearest coast now lay ahead 
some four miles to northward. Night came on. We 
headed toward the distant shore. We took our time, for 
there was driftwood aboard with which to build another 
great fire. Our beds would be on the moss beside it. We 
paddled on, unconcerned. But as the night deepened 
a wind rose. It cut our faces. We strained through the 


¢ 


112 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


gloom toward the shadow which was land. The wind 
blew harder. We dug in, Nawri’s “kiyee! kiyee!”’ stroking 
us. Big seas broke hard over the “man-killer’s” nose. We 
were fighting for inches, when above the piping of the wind, 
the smash of water and the din of paddles thumping on the 
gunwales, we heard the wash of surf. Soon we made the lee 


of land. 


IV 


HOUGH the wind still was strong, by morning it 
: blew offshore. We sailed on. By nightfall the 
colossal form of Cape Smith, wrapped in haze, lay 
prostrate across the thin line of coast. On its crest, one 
thousand eight hundred feet half-sheer from sea, died the 
last yellow shaft of sun. We were camped on a moss sward 
of shore, gathered around a great roaring driftwood 
fire, when from out of the darkness came three Eskimos. 
They stood frozen in their tracks when they saw myself— 
the kablunak—and around me strange Eskimos. But in a 
few moments Nawri had us all to rights, and with a steaming 
kettle of tea before us we were grouped happily around the 
fire. | 
“Yes,” their spokesman said, “the sea ice, only two sleeps 
ago, an east wind swept to sea; so all of the way to the big 
land to the north [that is, Cape Wolstenholme] the coast is 
clear.” With Nawri they went over my map and showed 
me where there might be camp grounds of other Eskimos; but 
driftwood, said they, we would not be likely from now on to 
find. Never did Eskimo so quickly gulp down the few 
scraps of food we had to spare, and the tobaccomik and tea 
we gave them they held close with trembling hands, when 
finally they bade us “chimo”’ and strode off through the 
gloom. 


Again the sky was cold and lowering. The wind following 
113 


114 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


blew strong. The ‘“‘man-killer” had all she could do to 
mount the seas. We reefed the leg-o’-mutton. A bawling 
wake wound out astern. The leg-o’-mutton, swaying gro- 
tesquely, frightened flocks of gulls that, flapping from the 
nearby reefs, wheeled over us in the air. By noon the coast 
hung out over us—gigantic tapestries mottled green, russet, 
and terra cotta, veined and interveined with milk-and-yellow 
quartz, one thousand feet to where they met the gray sky. 
The strata upon strata of white dots which stood out against 
them were gulls. The green seas were clotted here and 
there with sea pigeons, and eiders in black swarins like flies 
circled us. Among the rocks of one talus slope lay a splotch 
of white—a dead Arctic fox, so Nawri said, fallen from the 
cliff whilst poaching. 

Mile upon mile the speck of us sailed. Wilder were the 
seas. Puffs and squalls swooped straight down. The 
threshing leg-o’-mutton shook the “man-killer” as a terrier 
shakes a bone. Came a break in the clouds in the angry 
west, and the sun as it was sinking broke out. Like a 
searchlight it raked through the gloom. But nowhere was 
there a landing; no niche, no talus slope, nor even a projecting 
ledge big enough to land the “man-killer” on. The dirge 
of the sea throbbing through the cliffs; the wild, weird call- 
ing of the sea fowl; and the roaring of the wind—we had all 
but given up hope, when Nawri in the bow shot up and with 
his paddle pointed ahead. The helmsmen—it took two of 
them to hold her—swung the “‘man-killer’s” nose. She 
waddled for a moment, until the leg-o’-mutton filled and she 
shot into the wide-open arms of a tiny cove and rammed her 
nose full speed upon shore. 





© REV(ILLON FRERES,N.Y ROSERT J. FLAHERTY,F.R.E-5 


THE WALRUS HUNTER 


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EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 115 


“We cannot take the omiak farther,” said Nawri. A slot 
of a valley rose in half-sheer steps, winding up to the snow- 
clad tableland fifteen hundred feet above. The “man- 
killer,” the leg-o’-mutton, all but the clothes we wore, and 
the last few scraps of food, we reluctantly abandoned to 
climb the valley, thence over the tablelands to pick our way 
to what on my map was Eric Cove. 

The night was light enough, for all through it welts of red 
and yellow from the not far-sunken sun stood out in the 
north. Up half sheer faces of cliffs, on hands and knees 
scrambling over the talus, and knee-deep through banks of 
sodden snow we climbed to the tablelands; then on, half bent 
into the wind, over plains of snow that never disappear, we 
tramped through darkness. It was midnight when Nawri 
halted us abruptly. Before us stood a void and down into 
it wound a tongue of snow, its far end lost in gloom. Down 
through the snow and on to where it gave way to a wild, 
roaring stream, on till the cliffs were crowding high, tortu- 
ously we picked our way. Finally the ravine widened, 
the stream smoothed out to long, silent reaches, and before 
us a single square of yellow light shone through the darkness. 
“Kablunak!”’ exclaimed the men. 

A more desolate post than Wolstenholme I have never 
seen. Three sheds of houses stand on a narrow strand be- 
tween gigantic flanks of bare, ice-scoured hills. Wind, 
roaring down the flume of valley, blasts them with sand and 
gravel. At either hand down into the low-lying coast of 
Hudson Bay, or eastward along the bold, sheer headlands of 
Hudson Strait, the next two posts of the solitary fur men 
are hundreds of miles away. But my host, the factor, though 


116 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


his companions were none save Eskimos and his scanty 
rations came out of not too various cans, was contented 
enough. Said he, “Indeed, I enjoys it, sir,” 

I had expected that by the time of my arrival the fur 
ship from England would long since have passed into Hud- 
son Bay. Upon her, outward bound, I planned to take 
passage to Lower Canada. But no ship had come, none 
but a whaler ship had been seen from the headlands, working 
through the ice. The days dragged on. The first week of 
August came and was gone. No ship had ever been so late. 
We began to think she never would come; and the prospect 
of a second winter in the country, at God-forsaken Wol- 
stenholme, was staring me in the face when, on the bright 
morning of the eighth of August, came the welcome cry: 
“Omiak! Omiak!”’ 

The “man-killer’s”’ crew followed me down over the sand. 
We shook hands. They inquired if ever they would see me 
again—if they did, I should have no journey too long for 
them to make. 





PART IV 


FILMS 





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we set out from Newfoundland in the Laddie, I 
included in my equipment all the necessary appara- 
tus for making a motion picture film of the Eskimos. 

As the reader will remember, from St. John’s, Newfound- 
land, we sailed north along the coast of Labrador to the 
mouth of Hudson Strait. Owing to the heavy winds which 
prevailed in the Strait and the lateness of the season we had 
to abandon our original idea of wintering in Hudson Bay. 
So we put into the rugged snow-capped coast of Baffin Land. 

We cruised over mysterious bays and among tide-washed 
rocks and craggy islands. The tide, what with its rise and 
fall of over thirty feet, submerged, as it rose, and laid bare 
as it fell, numberless reefs. In the first good harbour we 
anchored ship. On the lookout for Eskimos, with the launch 
we chugged on through still more groups of islands. The 
day was almost gone when, clearing the island mask, we 
came upon big half-sheer cliffs of mainland. We had just 
about given up hope of seeing Eskimos, when the bowsman 
pointed toward shore. We made out three topeks. 

We called the usual ““Chimo! chimo!” A towsly head 
appeared, and an old woman came out haltingly, holding a 
naked babe in her arms. We knew then that there were 

119 


(): MY third expedition into the north, in 1913, when 


120 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


only women in the camp. Their men, said they, were in- 
land, deer-hunting among the hills. Trade candy, of 
colours dazzling to the eye, and black plug tobacco went far 
to break down their reserve. Whilst we lunched on sea 
biscuit and tea, waiting for the hunters to return, one comely 
girl—whaler-trained I could see from the spoons, an alarm- 
clock bell, and big Canadian pennies that dangled on the 
heel-long tail of her kooletah—brought forth an old accor- 
dion, which, bearing the hand-painted label, ‘‘Forget-me- 
not,” was evidently the gift of some affectionate whaler lad. 
She began diffidently enough at first to play. It was not 
long, however, before she was tearing off ““The Campbells 
are Coming,” hornpipes, and the devil’s reel, and Gushue, 
the mate, in his Newfoundland knee-boots of cowhide, was 
‘‘a-shakin’ ’°em down” on a granite ledge. In the midst of 
it the hunters returned. Their eyes sparkled at the prospect 
of a ship, with its treasure-trove of tobacco, sweets, guns, 
and tea, come amongst them. 

“Yes,” said their spokesman, the oldest, ‘‘where you are 
now is the mouth of Amadjuak Bay. At the head of the 
bay two small rivers flow into the sea, and even now there 
are Eskimos there, and the camps of half-a-hundred more” — 
he counted with the fingers of his hand—‘‘are less than a 
day’s kayaking away.” They smiled from ear to ear when 
we told them of the big igloo aboard the ship, which we were 
to put together and live in for a year. 

They were in their kayaks waiting at noon the following 
day when the Laddie, her flags flying, pulled out from the 
island mask toward them. All of them—their women, 
babies, and children, their dogs and tents and gear—were 


FILMS 121 


soon aboard. The cook plied them with sea biscuit, lard, 
and tea, and the gramophone above the rattle and clangour 
of the engine and the tumult of their and their dogs’ voices, 
poured out minstrel and Harry Lauder songs as the Laddie, 
with as closely packed and happy a throng as any Coney 
Island boat ever carried, sailed toward the head of Amadjuak 
Bay. 

On the northwest corner of the half-round, rugged head 
of Amadjuak Bay, we located, for here was not only har- 
bourage, but a small river tumbling with much fuss and 
pother over a half-mile rapid to sea—fresh water for our 
film-developing the winter through. “There are Hearne 
salmon here,” said one old Eskimo, “‘when spawning time 
begins in spring; and up beyond the rapids lies a little chain 
of lakes which leads to the great deer country in the interior.” 

With a will the Eskimos helped us unload. For three days 
an endless chain of them plied the ship’s dories, and their 
own kayaks catamaraned between ship and shore; while the 
women, old men, and children lugged and rolled and shoul- 
dered the burdens up over the slopes of rock. 

Within a week the Laddie’s work was done, and out over 
the harbour’s face she sailed for Newfoundland. 

There was skin ice over the harbour on several snapping 
clear days before September closed; then open water again 
through the bluff and bluster of October, which month ended 
with such a drifter that our launch, anchored bow and stern 
just offshore, sank to the bottom under the weight and drive 
of snow. By mid-November winter had settled down, and 
the hut, snow-walled, was made snug and warm. I chose the 
families who were to live the winter through in their igloos 


122 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


around us—one Yew, of long experience with whalers; one 
Noahasweetow; his son Annunglung; one “Jack Johnson”’; 
three half-grown boys, four wives, one old grandmother, 
and a flock of children. 

Until February we made no film, for there were long 
sledge trips to make east and west along the coast. During 
the memorable days when we were in the hut there was much 
to do. The evenings through there were always guests 
from the igloos around, come to smoke a pipe, to gossip 
about their hunting, to listen to “‘the little box that makes 
the fine noise’’; but most of all to watch our games of bil- 
liards which we played on a diminutive quarter-size table, 
under the yellow light of smoky lamps and rows of flickering 
candles, ejaculating their ‘“‘ayee’s” and “‘ah’s” and holding 
their breath while some cue ball slowly rolled its fateful 
course. | 

To our Christmas feast Eskimos sledged in from camps 
two days away—from Fair Ness, from the Isle of God’s 
Mercy, Chorkback, and Markham Bay. While outfitting 
in Newfoundland, two of the men had been deputed to make 
up a feast and pack it in a special box marked “Christmas,” 
keeping the contents a secret. Much too slowly December 
dragged on, and we decreed that the twenty-fifth of Decem- 
ber was a mere figure of speech. We elected the fifteenth as 
the gladsome day. 

The billiard table, covered with canvas, was our festive 
board. The Eskimos dined on less delectable but bulkier 
fare in the overcrowded kitchen just beyond. Noahaswee- 
tow’s and Annunglung’s wives, uniformed in two old pairs 
of pajamas over their clothes of deerskin, served the table. 


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FILMS 123 


“Jack Johnson” manned the phonograph the while. It 
was midnight when they all filed out, varicoloured paper hats 
from Tom Thumb crackers cocked on their happy heads. 

February came, cold but glowingly clear and calm. Then 
we began our films. We did not want for codperation. 
The women vied with one another to be starred. Igloo 
building, conjuring dances, sledging, and seal-hunting were 
run off as the sunlit days of February and March wore on. 
Of course there was occasional bickering, but only among 
the women—jealousy, usually, of what they thought was the 
Over-prominence of some rival in the film. One young 
mother, whom, with her baby, I was in the midst of filming 
one clear day, suddenly got up, and despite my threats and 
pleas, walked away. Neither she nor her husband had been 
up to snuff of late, so I decided to send them away. ‘Don’t 
care,’ said she, when in the most impressive way we an- 
nounced her fate, “‘seals are the best food anyway.” But 
old Yew, ever father of his flock, interposed, and what was 
finally picked out from the crazy-quilt of his pidgin English 
was that she was not altogether wrong. Two times in as 
many days I had given Luliakame’s (her rival’s) baby candy, 
but I “no see him hers.” 

With April came longer and warmer days; some days so 
warm that even on the sledges we fell asleep, while the dogs 
wandered where and how they willed. By the end of May 
sledge expeditions far afield—along the coast up into the 
mouth of Fox Channel in the west, distant some 170 miles; 
and east 150 miles to Lake Harbour—had been accomplished. 
June came in with daylight the twenty-four hours long. 
Hunters came sledging in from the interior, bringing tales of 


124 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


deer everywhere. Noahasweetow and Annunglung, know- 
ing that I was planning a deer-hunting film, came in one 
day from a two-sleeps’ journey northward, bringing lashed 
on their sledge a live year-old deer, which, they explained, 
they had slightly wounded and captured by running down. 
Their gift proved embarrassing, for what with so many dogs 
at large, we had to keep it for three disturbing nights in a 
place of security, which was none other than our kitchen. 

On the tenth of June I prepared for our long-planned deer- 
filming expedition, and on the following day, with camera 
and retorts of film and food for twenty days, Annunglung 
and I left for the deer grounds of the interior. Through 
those long June days we travelled far. The thick yellow 
sun, hanging low in the northern sky for all the hours save 
the two at midnight, seemed to roll along the blue masses of 
the far-off hills. Deer were everywhere, pawing up the 
mosses deep in the valleys, or in long bands winding funere- 
ally across the white surfaces of little lakes and ponds. In 
three days we had climbed to the summit, a wind-swept 
boulder plain, of the height of land—the divide of the waters 
flowing south into Hudson Strait, and north through un- 
known Lake Amadjuak. Behind us lay the welter of 
wrinkled hills through which we had come; before us a void 
of plain. 

We were picking out a course when Annunglung pointed 
to what seemed to be so many boulders in a valley far below. 
The boulders moved. “Tooktoo!’? Annunglung whis- 
pered. We mounted camera and tripod on the sledge. 
Dragging his six-fathom whip ready to cow the dogs before 
they gave tongue, Annunglung went on before the team. 


FILMS 126 


We swung in behind the shoulder of an intervening hill. 
When we rounded it we were almost among them. The team 
lunged. The deer, all but three, galloped to right and left 
up the slope. Three kept to the valley. On we sped, the 
camera rocking like the mast of a ship at sea. From the 
galloping dogs to the deer not two hundred feet beyond, 
I filmed and filmed and filmed. Yard by yard we began 
closing in. The dogs, sure of victory, gave tongue. Then 
something happened. Iam not altogether clear as to how it 
happened. All that I know is that I fell headlong into a 
deep drift of snow. The sledge was belly-up, and across the 
traces of the bitterly disappointed team Annunglung was 
doubled up with laughter. 

Within two days we swung back for camp, jubilant over 
what I was sure was the film of films. But within twelve 
miles of the journey’s end, crossing the rotten ice of a stream, 
the sledge broke through. Exit film. 

On the twenty-third of August we saw the last of good old 
Yew, Annunglung, Noahasweetow, “Jack Johnson,” and 
their wives and babies and children, and the hills of Baffin 
Land sank slowly into the sea. 


I] 


the Belcher Islands and down the coasts of Hudson 

and James bays, I have already told. I left the 
Laddie to be berthed for the winter at Moose Factory, and 
the film, along with the specimens, maps, and notes, went 
with me by canoe up the Moose and the Mattagami to the 
“line.” The film, during my winter in lower Canada, was 
edited and put in form. It was too crude to be interesting. 
But I was to go north again in the spring—this time to ex- 
plore and winter on the Belcher Islands. I determined to 


() OUR adventures after leaving Baffin Land, among 


attempt a better one. 

Through the winter on the Belchers there was much in the 
way of exploration to be done, but from late February on, 
whenever there were good days, I worked at remaking and 
_ building up the film I had begun in Baffin Land. In the long 
evenings around the hut’s crackling stove my Eskimos and 
I talked and speculated as to what scenes could be made. 
Said Wetalltok one night: ‘“‘Why not, when the ice breaks in 
spring, make the aggie [picture] of the big iviuk [walrus]? 
There are small sea-swept islands some three sleeps north of 
here where the iviuk live. I know, for I have killed them 
there. Twenty I killed and flensed during one short day.” 

“The walrus is bad when he is angry,” Wetalltok con- 
tinued. ‘That same summer one Eskimo went out from 
shore with his kayak to hunt ducks. Though early in the 


126 


FILMS 127 


morning there had been a walrus kill, there were no signs of 
walrus then. He did not come back. All that the people 
could find were pieces of kayak. The water was red, red, 
red. 

“And you have heard of that kablunak [a member of the 
Northwest Mounted Police at Cape Fullerton]. Their 
whaleboat was strong and big, but the walrus they had 
wounded with their gun but did not kill swam under the boat 
and up over the side. With his tusks he turned it over. 
Two of the kablunak swam in to shore, which was near, but 
the other one was frightened. He swam out. The two 
kablunak who got out on shore saw the walrus charge the 
kablunak who was swimming. The walrus kept on charging 
him, even after he was dead. Then he went for the boat 
and smashed it to pieces with his tusks. And then he charged 
the pieces which floated on the sea. 

“To come upon the walrus sleeping upon the shore will be 
the surest way to make the aggie. I will crawl in among 
them and throw my harpoon. Quick they will all roll into 
the sea. Then will come the fight. It will take all of us to 
hold him with the line of my harpoon. You will see his 
mates close around him. They will all be very, very angry.” 
Such was the beginning of the iviuk aggie. . 

When June came we were ready and waiting to begin the 
trip. Salty Bill had long since had the Nastapoka rigged and 
painted and waiting to slide into the sea the moment the ice 
cleared away. 

On the seventeenth the break-up came, and within the 
day the Nastapoka was launched, loaded, and under way. 
On the last of June we cleared from the last north of the Bel- 


128 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


cher Islands. At sundown we picked up a bit of land, a 
boulder-covered waste not much more than a ship’s length 
long. The reader will remember how, attracted by the 
swarms of sea pigeons that as thick as flies flew up over the 
island, we ventured too near, and before we knew what had 
happened, the Nastapoka, sagging in a big ground-swell, 
struck and began pounding to pieces on the rocks. He will 
remember, too, the three long weeks we spent there, and 
how, with nothing but a few pieces of driftwood, Salty Bill 
made a Spanish winch and worked the Nastapoka in to shore; 
and how, with bits of board and canvas, though she had 
holes in her through which one could crawl, Salty finally 
fixed her up again. During these dragging days there was 
little my Eskimos or I could do; so when Mukpollo proposed 
that in our small open boat and his kayak we continue on 
northward to the iviuk islands, I decided to make the at- 
tempt, forlorn though it seemed to be, since it would be our 
one last chance to make the film we had planned and waited 
for so long. Our boat, sixteen feet long, and the kayak, we 
would catamaran if we came upon rough weather. 

What few islands lay along the way were small—the larg- 
est less than a mile across. All of them were surf-bound, and 
the distance between the small pinpoints some of them ap- 
peared to be was often more than ten miles. Luck was 
with us, however, for in the jumps we made from one to an- 
other we had always smooth seas. We had put in a long 
day’s travelling and the sun was low down in the west, when 
Mukpollo, pointing northward to the smallest island speck of 
all, said: ‘There is the last of the islands; I hope there are 
walrus there.” We drew near, scanning every inch of shore- 


FILMS 129 


line; but the patch of tawn which we knew would mean a 
sleeping herd was nowhere to be seen. That they might be 
on the island’s far shore was our one last hope. We looked 
about for a landing through the surf. Just beyond the shoul- 
der of a little cove, ““Iviuk! Iviuk!”’ called Mukpollo, and 
sure enough, on the gleaming black surf-worn rocks lay a 
great herd sprawled out asleep. | 

Down wind we went, careful as to muffled oars, and landed 
waist-deep in the surf. Mukpollo went off alone toward 
the sleeping herd; he returned, saying that they were undis- 
turbed. However, it was much too dark for pictures; we 
would have to wait until morning. “Yes,” said Mukpollo, 
in answer to my fears, “if the wind holds in the same quarter 
they will not get our scent.” Not daring to build a drift- 
wood fire, we made out our evening meal on raw bacon, sea 
biscuit, and cold water. 

As luck would have it, the wind did hold. With harpoon 
set and a stout seal line carefully coiled, and my motion 
picture camera and film retorts in hand, off we crawled for 
the walrus ground. The herd lay sleeping—twenty great 
hulks guarded by two big bulls. At about minute intervals 
they raised their heads over the snoring and swinishly grunt- 
ing herd and slowly looked around, then sank to sleep again. 
Slowly I snaked up to the sheltering screen of a big boulder, 
and Mukpollo, the end of his harpoon line lashed around the 
boulder, snaked more slowly still out toward them. Once 
in the open he could move only when the sentinels dropped 
their heads in sleep. Hours it seemed; but finally he had 
crawled close in. The sentinels became suspicious and 
stupidly stared toward him. Slowly they turned their 


130 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


slobbering heads to and fro; Mukpollo swung his own head | 


in lugubrious unison. They rolled on their sides to scratch 
themselves; Mukpollo as grotesquely did likewise. Finally 
the sentinels seemed satisfied; their heads dropped in sleep 
once more. Now only a dozen feet intervened; quickly 
Mukpollo closed in. As I signalled he rose upon his feet, and 
with his harpoon held high, like lightning he struck down at 
the nearest bull. A bellow and a roar, and twenty great 
walrus rolled with incredible speed down the wave-washed 
slope of rocks to sea. 

“The line! The line!” cried Mukpollo, “watch the line!” 


—which was twanging in the air like a fiddle string. But 


even as he called it snapped in two, and the bull he had 
stalked so patiently dived and made away. Followed a 
furious churn of water, and heads with black beady eyes and 
long, wicked tusks shot up, their battle-cry resounding. 
The wounded bull threshing the sea in his rage and fury, the 
herd around him charging—I filmed and filmed, until the 
last inch was ground away. 

In two days we were back again to where Bill and the half. 
breed were working on the still much-bruised and battered 
Nastapoka. 

But, confident now of our ability to hop, skip, and jump 
between the islands, I decided to go on with Mukpollo to the 
base.. Came a two days’ gale, but the morning of the third 
day broke clear, and though the swells still ran long and high 
there was little wind. -Off we struck for the next island, some 
fifteen miles south. The speck of it we could barely make 
out, for the swells ran higher than our boat was long. 

The day was done before the boom of the surf rang in our 


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FILMS 131 


ears. Overnight came heavy wind, and for two days we 
waited for the sea to calm down. When again we launched 
out, what wind there was followed us. So we sailed, cover- 
ing in an hour what would have taken thrice that time by 
paddle. By night we had reached the last island of the 
chain. But one more gap, some twelve miles, lay between 
us and home. Bowling on with the bone in our teeth, we 
closed in to the sea-swept shore, looking for a landing. 
What beach there was gave way to a short line of cliffs. 
Beyond them we hoped to find a cove. 

Of a sudden the blanket we had for sail began threshing in 
a squall of wind. Before we could haul in sail we were 
caught in the undertow. With the film retorts of the iviuk 
aggie Mukpollo sprang clear. Omarolluk grabbed his har- 
poon and my gun, and I followed with the cameras. The 
kayak came out of it unhurt, but the open boat was no more. 
Only her ribs remained. 

Followed two days of wind and driving rain. What food 
we had was sea biscuit and water, and shelter, the lee of 
boulders. “‘The best thing now,” said Mukpollo, “is for 
Tookalook to crawl inside my kayak and I will paddle down 
to your big igloo and return with the kayak and your old 
canoe.” 

Came wind and rain. For two daysI stayed within the 
boulder shelter. The wind became almost a gale and the 
seas drove high. As the murk of night crept through the 
storm, thought I, “‘There’s going to be another day of it.”’ 
And then above the din of wind and rain and sea came what 
sounded like a faint ‘Chimo-o-o.”” Mechanically I looked 
out. With unbelieving eyes, I made out two men in my old 


132 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


canoe—Tookalook, steering in the stern; and Mukpollo, 
bailing with a pail. They had a piece of blanket for sail 
with which to carry on. Mukpollo’s kayak, catamaraned, 
was all that kept them from swamping as they sprang up 
from nowhere to the crests of sprawling seas. 

The day following we were home once more. Another 
day and I had developed the “‘iviuk aggie”’; and that evening 
with Tookalook and Mukpollo looking on, I unrolled it be- 
fore the lamplight. Every scene was there. 

The reader will remember our difficulties with the Laddie 
—how she had to be abandoned during the winter and used 
up, piece by piece, for fuel. The only craft remaining in 
which we could make the five hundred miles down through 
the open bay to the mouth of the Moose River was the little 
thirty-six-foot Nastapoka. Bruised and battered as she was, 
Bill, as soon as he got her down to the base, pulled her up 
and overhauled her, declaring that, gales or no, she would do 
for the big trip down. Of course, everything had to be left 
behind save the clothes we wore, some three weeks’ food, 
notes, maps, specimens, and the film—two boxes covered by 
the Eskimos with waterproofing of sealskin carefully sewn. 

On the thirteenth of September we climbed aboard. The 
following morning we were fifty miles on and the last outlier 
of the Belchers disappeared. Then for three days September 
gales blew head on, and with all James Bay for sea room the 
Nastapoka, with mainsail reefed and rudder lashed, hove to. 
When the gale blew out, from island to island we kept on, 
standing behind them when the winds were against us; then 
on again with each good slant. It was two weeks before we 
reached the south end of the Bay. 


FILMS 133 


On the first of October we left the little Nastapoka snugged 
up in the placid cove at ‘“‘Moose.”’ In two weeks more we 
saw the last of rapids, long bends, and portages. We “struck 
the line.” The film was safe and sound. And then came 
the end—while putting it in form, from nothing more for- 
midable than my cigarette, the last inch of it went up in 
smoke! 

To make a long story short, I could not forget the film; I 
decided to go north again, this time wholly for the purpose 
of picturing the people I had come to like so well. Mr. John 
Revillon and Captain Thierry Mallet, of Revillon Fréres, un- 
dertook to finance the project. Their fur post at Cape 
Dufferin, on northeastern Hudson Bay, was to be the nucleus 
for my work. . 

On the fifteenth of August we let go anchor in the mouth 
of the Innusuk River, and the five gaunt and melancholy- 
looking buildings which make up the post stood out on a 
boulder-ridden slope less than half a mile a way. 

Of the Eskimos who were known to the post, a dozen all 
told were selected for the film. Of these Nanook, a charac- 
ter famous in the country, I chose as my chief man. Be- 
sides him, and much to his approval, I took on three younger 
men as helpers. This also meant their wives and families, 
dogs to the number of twenty-five, sledges, kayaks, and 
hunting impedimenta. 

As luck would have it, the first film to be made was that of 
a walrus hunt. From Nanook I heard of the “Walrus Is- 
land.”’ On its south end, a surf-bound beach, there were in 
summer, he said, many walrus, judging from signs that had 
been seen by a winter sealing crowd of Eskimos who at one 


134 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


time had been caught there by a break-up of the ice. “The 
people do not go out to the island in summer,” he con- 
tinued, ‘“‘for not only is it out of sight of land, but it is 
ringed with heavy surf—dangerous landing for kayaks. 
But for a long time I have had my eyes on your whaleboat,”’ 
said he, “‘and I am sure, if the seas are smooth, it is big 
enough forcrossingover, and just the thing for landing.” 

Through the busy weeks that followed, time and time 
again Nanook reminded me of the many, many moons it was 
since he had hunted walrus. One morning I woke up to see 
the profile of rising ground just beyond my window covered 
with topeks. Nanook popped his head in through the door. 
They were Eskimos from the north, he said, far away. 
‘And among them,” eagerly he continued, “‘is the very man 
who saw the walrus signs on Walrus Island.” 

Nanook was off, to return in a moment more leading the 
great man through the door. We talked iviuk through the 
hour. ‘‘Suppose we go,” said I in conclusion, “do you know 
that you and your men may have to give up making a kill, if 
it interferes with my film? Will you remember that it is the 
picture of you hunting the iviuk that I want, and not their 
meat?” 

““Yes, yes, the aggie will come first,” earnestly he assured 
me. ‘Not a man will stir, not a harpoon will be thrown 
until you give the sign. It is my word.” We shook hands 
and agreed to start next day. 

For three days we lay along the coast, before the big seas 
outside died down. The wind began blowing off the land. 
We broke out our leg-o’-mutton. Before the day was half 
done a film of gray far out in the west told us we were in 


FILMS 135 


sight of Walrus Island. By nightfall we closed in to the 
thundering shadow that was its shore. 

For hours we lounged around the luxury of a driftwood 
fire, soaking in its warmth and speculating on our chances 
for the morrow. When daylight came we made off to where 
the stranger had told us he had found the walrus signs. It 
was a crescent of beach pounded by the surf. While we 
looked around, one after another the heads of a school of 
walrus, their wicked tusks gleaming in the sun, shot up above 
the sea. 

By night all my stock of film was exposed. The whale- 
boat was full of walrus meat and ivory. Nanook never had 
such walrus-hunting and never had I such filming, as that on 
Walrus Island. 

Three days later the post bell clangs out the welcome news 
that the kablunak is about to show his iviuk aggie. Men, 
old men, women, old women, boys, girls, and small children 
file in to the factor’s house. Soon there is not an inch of 
space to spare. The trader turns down the lamps. The 
projector light shoots over the shocks of heads upon the blan- 
ket which is the screen. 

Then the picture. A figure appears. There is silence. 
They do not understand. ‘See, it is Nanook!”’ the trader 
cries. “The Nanook in the flesh laughs his embarrassment. 
“Ah! ah! ah!” they all exclaim. Then silence. The figure 
moves. The silence deepens. They cannot understand. 
They turn their heads. They stare at the projector. They 
stare at its beam of magic light. They stare at Nanook, 
the most surprised of all, and again their heads turn toward 
the screen. They follow the figure which now snakes to- 


136 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


ward the background. There is something in the back- 
ground. The something moves. It lifts its head. ' 

“Tviuk! iviuk!” shakes the room. The figure stands up, 
harpoon poised in hand. | 

“Be sure of your harpoon! be sure of your harpoon!” the 
audience cries. | 

The figure strikes down; the walrus roll off into the sea. 
More figures rush in; they grab the harpoon line. For dear 
life they hold on. 

“Hold him! hold him!” shout the men. ‘“‘Hold him! hold 
him!”’ squeal the women. “Hold him!” pipe the children. 

The walrus’s mate dives in, and by locking tusks attempts 
rescue. ’ 

“Hold him!” gasps the crowd. 

Nanook and his crew, although their arms seem to be 
breaking, hold on. But slowly and surely the threshing 
walrus drags the figures nearer sea. 

“Hold him! hold him!” they despair. They are breathing 
hard. “Dig in! dig in!” they rasp, as Nanook’s feet slip 
another inch through the sand. 

Deep silence. Suddenly the line sags, the crew, like a flash, 
draw in the slack, and inch by inch the walrus is pulled in to. 
shore. Bedlam rocks the house. 

The fame of the film spread far up and far down the coast. 
Every strange Eskimo that came into the post Nanook 
brought before me and begged that he be shown the iviuk 


aggie. 


Ill 


HIRTY or more years ago the interior of northern 
Ungava teemed with bands of barren-ground cari- 
bou. They numbered thousands. Now, however, 


there are only a few straggling bands. A caribou kill of even 
half-a-dozen after a long summer’s trip into the interior is an 


event among the Eskimos. Skins for clothing consequently 
are rare. The Cape Dufferin people are the poorest clad I 
have ever seen. ‘The clothing of Nanook and his crew was 
no exception, so I cast around for means of getting skins with 
which to make new and better costumes. No skins were to 
be had. Those few fortunates who had new deerskin cloth- 
ing refused to let it go for anything I might have in exchange. 
I did secure for my own wear a much-worn kooletah (hooded 
coat) and an old pair of deerskin trousers, but the present in 
exchange was a brand-new Winchester and two hundred 
cartridges. 

Along about freeze-up time, one Nevalingha came into the 
post to trade. Nanook let me know that he and his hunting 
companion had made a deer kill in the far interior during the 
summer—so far, however, from the coast, that they had had 
to cache the skins and horns, expecting to bring them down 
by sledge in winter. I approached Nevalingha in the hope 
of securing the skins, but he explained that all of them were 
promised, some to his father, some to his friends, some to his 
brother, and soon. He couldn’t break his promises, and at 

137 


138 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


any rate they all needed them badly. As well did I need 
them, and I made extravagant bids, but all that I had, said 
he, could not compensate for the lack of warm winter cloth- 
ing. However, those to whom he was to have given skins 
were prevailed upon to release him from his promises. I 
was to give him food and ammunition and walrus meat for 
his dogs, and upon his return with the skins was to pay him 
as much as if they were all white foxes. Nevalingha, the 
ne’er-do-well, became prospectively a rich man. He had 
never stood high in the factor’s favour—“‘hell for eatin’ and 
not much for foxes,” the latter said. He and his companions 
were gone three weeks into a country in which the Eskimos 
had never hunted foxes before. They returned with not 
only the twenty-two deerskins, but to the amazement of the 
factor, with the prime pelts of forty-three foxes—to an Es- 
kimo a fabulous fortune. 

When in December the snow lay heavy on the ground 
Nanook and his men abandoned their topeks of sealskin and 
a village of snow igloos sprung up around my wintering post. 
They snow-walled my little hut to the eaves with thick 
blocks of snow. My kitchen was their rendezvous—there 
was always a five-gallon pail of tea steeping on the stove and 
sea biscuit in the barrel. My little gramophone, too, was 
common property. Caruso, Farrar, Riccardo, Martin, 
McCormack, served their turns with Harry Lauder, Al 
Jolson, and Jazz King orchestras. Caruso in the Pagliacci 
prologue with its tragic ending was to them the most comic 
record of the lot. Nanook shook with laughter; the children 
rolled with merriment on the floor. 

Nanook was always busy at some work or other, con- 





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FILMS 139 


stantly on the lookout to barter for game if some hunting 
team came in, to inquire into every strange hunting ex- 
perience which might at some time in future serve for the 
kablunak’s aggie; to see that the stoves kept drawing; to 
keep the drift from clogging up my cabin windows. On days 
when there was film developing he, “‘Harry Lauder,” their 
wives and children shuttled from the cabin to the waterhole, 
with dogs and sledge hauling water for the kablunak’s 
thirsty coils of film—two ice-clogged barrels at a time. 

One of Nanook’s problems was to construct an igloo large 
enough for the filming of interior scenes. The average 
Eskimo igloo, about twelve feet in diameter, was much too 
small. On the dimensions I laid out for him, a diameter of 
twenty-five feet, Nanook and his companions started in to 
build the biggest igloo of their lives. For two days they 
worked, the women and children helping them. Then came 
the hard part—to cut insets for five large slab-ice windows 
without weakening the dome. They had hardly begun when 
the dome fell in pieces to the ground. ‘“‘Never mind,” said 
Nanook, “I can do it next time.” 

For two days more they worked, but again with the same 
result; as soon as they began setting in the ice windows their 
structure fell to the ground. It was a huge joke this time, 
and holding their sides they laughed their misfortune away. 
Again Nanook began on the “big aggie igloo,” but this time 
the women and children hauled barrels of water on sledges 
from the waterhole and iced the walls as fast as they went up. 
Finally the igloo was finished and they stood eyeing it as 
satisfied as so many children over a house of blocks. The 
light from the ice windows proved inadequate, however, and 


140 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


when the interiors were finally filmed the dome’s half just 
over the camera had to be cut away, so Nanook and his fam- 
ily went to sleep and awakened with all the cold of out-of- 
doors pouring in. 

To “Harry Lauder” I deputed the care of my cameras. 
Bringing them from the cold outside into contact with the 
warm air of the base often frosted them inside and out, which 
necessitated taking them apart and carefully drying them 
piece by piece. With the motion picture cameras there was 
no difficulty, but with my Graflex I found to my sorrow such 
a complication of parts that I could not get it together again. » 
For several days its “innards” lay strewn on my work table. 
“Harry Lauder”’ finally volunteered for the task of putting 
them together, and through a long evening before a flickering 
candle and with a crowd of Eskimos around ejaculating their 
““ayee’s”’ and “‘ah’s,” he managed to succeed where I had 
failed. 

Never shall I forget his proffered ministrations to an 
ulcerated tooth. After witnessing the inadequacy of all the 
resources of my medicine kit and the disastrous failure of an 
attempt to pull, he came to me, with a tiny drill which he 
had laboriously fashioned out of a tenpenny nail and 
mounted in a carpenter’s brace. 

Between Nanook and “Harry Lauder”’ and myself there 
never was a serious misunderstanding. But that they should 
arise between myself and some of the Eskimos with whom I 
was less intimate was, I suppose, inevitable. They were due 
for the most part to my own inability, perhaps, to com- 
prehend exactly what they meant to say and under ordinary 
circumstances were soon explained away. Only once under 


FILMS 141 


peculiar stress did misunderstanding assume serious pro- 
portions. This was with one Aviuk, on our return from an 
expedition up the coast. For three days we had been with- 
out oil—three days of subsisting on cold food and no tea— 
when we came to a cache and a gallon of the precious fuel. 
The following day, travelling with difficulty in the face of a 
bitterly cold drifter, we had halted to disentangle the snarled 
traces of the team, and Aviuk called to me saying that the 
oil was gone—had been left behind. Only then did I realize 
all that that oil meant. I could not contain myself. “Harry 
Lauder” and his companion, scenting trouble, discreetly 
withdrew, one ahead and one behind, and were lost in a blur 
of drift. Aviuk had drawn his snow knife from his belt and 
now, brandishing it in front of me, was pouring out a lava 
flow in Eskimo. The harpoons lay lashed in front of me on 
the sledge, and I was debating my chances of seizing one in 
time when it dawned upon me that Aviuk’s rather startling 
pantomime was not intended offensively. Out of the drift 
at this juncture came “‘Harry Lauder” holding aloft the lost 
article—an old tin can I had thrown away! The incident 
was closed that night over a love feast of dried apples with 
plenty of sugar, well cooked and warm. All through Janu- 
ary the Eskimos complained of the hard winter—no seals. 
The sea, said they, was frozen for miles and miles, farther 
out than in any other year they could remember. There had 
been a lapse of days in the constant winter winds and the 
movement and the milling of the icefields were stilled, and 
like magic seal-hunting lanes and tidal pools were frozen 
fast. Until heavy gales again should blow, the doors of 
their hunting grounds were closed. Some spoke of the long 


142 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


and fruitless vigils, day by day and through the nights, over 
the breathing holes of seal; some, without seal oil for their 
lamps, of the darkness of the igloos. They spoke even of the 
madness that comes from starvation, and in distress of mind 
sought advice as to what they should do with a madman who 
terrorized and paralyzed the whole village, threatening the 
safety of women and children and keeping the men from their 
hunting. There were tales of bear, themselves hungry for 
the seal upon which they live, prowling about the encamp- 
ments at night. One old couple asleep in their igloo had been 
wakened by the snow of the igloo dome falling on their faces, 
to see by the feeble lamplight the mask of a bear sniffing and 
growling as he moved his head to and fro—sniffing the good 
seal-oil smell of lamp and clothing. Desperately enough the 
old woman had seized her trimming stick, lighted it, and 
holding it to the bear’s nose had kept the beast at bay while 
her husband crawled outside for his harpoon! 

The walrus hunting having proved successful, Nanook as- 
pired to bigger game—a bear hunt, no less, at Cape Sir 
Thomas Smith, some two hundred miles northward. “‘Here,” 
said Nanook, ‘‘is where the she-bear den in the winter, and 
it seems to me that we might get the big, big aggie there.” 

He went on to describe how in early December the she- 
bear dens in huge drift banks of snow. ‘There is nothing to 
mark the den save a tiny vent, or airhole, which is melted 
open by the animal’s body heat. His companions would 
remain at either side of me, rifles in hand, whilst he with his 
snow knife would open up the den, block by block. The 
dogs in the meantime would all be unleashed and like wolves 
circle the opening. Mrs. Bear’s door opened, Nanook, with 


FILMS 143 


nothing but his harpoon, would be poised and waiting. 
The dogs baiting the quarry—some of them with her light- 
ning paws the bear would send hurtling through the air; him- 
self dancing here and there—he pantomimed the scene on 
my cabin floor, using my fiddle bow for harpoon—waiting 
to dart in for a close-up throw; this, he felt sure, would be a 
big, big picture (aggie peerualluk). I agreed with him. 

“With good going ten days will see us there. Ten days 
for hunting on the Cape, then ten days for coming home 
again. But throw in another ten days for bad weather, and 
let’s see [counting on his fingers]|—that makes four times my 
fingers—more than enough to see us through.” 

“All right,” said I, “we'll go.’ And Nanook, his eyes 
shining, went off to spread the news. 

For two weeks we prepared. First of all Nanook and 
“Harry Lauder”’ sledged out over the sea ice for walrus meat 
we had cached under boulders on the walrus island. Every 
night we cooked our big iron pot full of pork and beans and 
poured them into a large sack, which hung from a hook out 
of doors, to freeze them. Nanook relashed with tough seal- 
skin thongs and smoothed the runners of his staunchest 
sledge, whilst his and the wives of his crew on my cabin 
floor sewed and sewed boots, kooletahs, and dogskin mitts, 
and fashioned a new sealskin dog whip six fathoms long. 
Most important of all were the bows and arrows and bear 
spears, all to be headed, not with the kablunak’s iron, but 
with stones, as in days of long ago. 

The day before the start four sledges of Eskimos came in 
from the north, all of them complaining of the hard winter— 
no seal. They told us, moreover, that from Cape Smith on 


144 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


down to Cape Dufferin no Eskimos remained. All had 
sledged south, for everywhere was the hunting condition the 
same. With no Eskimos along the coast to depend upon 
for dog food, to get dog food, said Nanook, when the supply 
on the sledge was gone, we must ourselves kill. This might 
mean spending weeks in hunting. So we cast around for an 
extra team and two men to come as a relay part way: but 
though there were willing men, no one had the dogs to spare. 


IV 


HE seventeenth of January was cold enough. I 
scratched a peephole through the frost enamel of my 
window. Sundogs, two faint balls of brass, flanked 
the weak, low-hanging sun. Snow smoke swept the ground, 
the igloo domes near by, and the jowl of a distant granite 
hill. Before I had finished my last scalding mug of tea there 
was a knock on the cabin door, and Nanook, brushing the 
snow from his furs, walked in. He smiled “‘good morning,” 
as he took up my duffle-bag and eiderdown and handed 
them out to be lashed aboard the sledge. 

“This is good wind,” observed Nanook, as we halted some 
three hours on to untangle the traces of the team. ‘See how 
it packs the snow.” Before the day was half done the snow 
was like a pavement. The big sledge swayed and rocked 
with speed. By nightfall the wild fan of dogs were scram- 
bling like a pack of wolves up the slope of the last igloo vil- 
lage on the coast, miles beyond the point we had hoped to 
make. 

By daybreak we were off again, helter-skelter down a 
steep slope, a-crash through the tidal ice, then off straight 
north through twisting snow-smoke on an unending sweep of 
frozen sea. All day long we jogged, our faces masked by ice, 
the frozen sweat of heavy running. On some of the small 
whalebacks of islands which were strung out along the way 


145 


146 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


we saw the empty shells of igloos of hungry Eskimos who 
long since had sledged south in search of seal. And before 
the day was done we picked out the black dots of many 
Eskimos and teams. They were the last of the Eskimos 
from the north—six sledges bound south for seal. They 
thronged around the sledge, hungry for hunting news and 
any crumbs of food we might have to spare. 

By nightfall we were beyond the last high hill. Ahead 
the coast led off, a thin black line, not much higher than the 
monotone of white through which it wound. “We are well 
on the way,” said Nanook, spacing the post, our position, and 
Cape Smith with his snow knife on the snow. “Five days 
By dark the team, long since fed, 


>> 


and we will be there. 
were asleep, snugged up in the snow and blanketed by the 
drift which ran low along the ground. 

Nanook never built a better igloo. The edges of its 
dominoes of snow were sapphires gleaming in the seal lamp’s 
yellow light. Of royal height and width was the sleeping 
bunk Nanook carved for me out of blocks of snow. Over the 
oil lamp I cooked up a brewis of sea biscuit and codfish and 
stewed dried apples for the crew. We went to sleep on 
Nanook’s stories of seal and fox and bear hunting on the 
Cape. | 

By candlelight we gulped breakfast, and at the first crack 
of dawn crawled out—but what a sight! The down of new- 
fallen snow lay heavy on the ground. Nota breath of wind 
moved over it. The team moved like a snail. Nanook’s 
long whip cracked through the air. 

‘‘ Aput peeungatwaluk” [bad snow, bad snow], complained 
the men. We kept far out on the smooth ice at sea, so 





| © Revillon ree 
NANOOK THE HARPOONER 





FILMS 147 


Nanook never knew just where we were, until on the eighth 
day at sundown we sighted on the hump of a small island an 
abandoned village of snow houses, the black holes of their 
doorways gaping and broken down. “To this place we 
have taken ten days,” Nanook glumly said. ‘With good 
going it is only three days from home. Only three days 
from home, and our dog food almost gone.” 

Morning came with a stiff wind swinging in from sea. 
With every hour the going grew harder and the team once 
more worked with a semblance of their old-time speed. 
When evening came on, with Nanook I climbed to the crest 
of an island, hoping he would sight some familiar landmark. 
But the coast was all the same—a thin black line. Mechani- 
cally our eyes followed it as it wound off into the north, until 
_ suddenly we caught sight of what first seemed a wisp of blue- 
gray cloud, indefinable, far away. I could not believe it 
when Nanook said it was the Cape. ‘‘But far off,” he added, 
“all of five days away.” The evening through the crew 
hunched up over mending and I from the depths of my eider- 
down listened again to Nanook’s adventures on the Cape. 

“Three winters ago on the Cape,” said Nanook, “there 
were many, many bear. One night the snarling and yelping 
of the dogs in the igloo tunnel woke me. In the igloo, head 
and shoulders through the door, was a bear. He had come 
in through the snow tunnel. Behind him the dogs were bit- 
ing and snapping at his legs and haunches; he could not back 
out and he could not come through. My harpoon and spears 
were outside. I must cut a hole through the igloo walls; but 
the walls—it was an old igloo—were almost ice. The bear 


148 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


was growling, showing his teeth—his lips were all foam. If 
the dogs would let him he would smash down the door. I 
cut through the igloo wall and got my spear. My family 
were frightened.” 

Said “Harry Lauder’: ‘“Annunglung and his mother 
[Annunglung’s father was dead] killed a bear last winter on 
the Kogaluk. Annunglung is only a boy. He and his 
mother were going from the igloo to the river’s mouth to fish. 
They met a bear. They wanted that bear, for they were 
hungry. But all they had was a bow and arrow. The dogs 
brought the bear to a stand. Annunglung shot all his ar- 
rows, but he did not kill the bear. They had nothing left. 
They wanted the bear, for they were very, very hungry. 
One arrow was sticking in the bear; the others were near him 
on the ground. Annunglung, to fool the bear, jumped 
toward his head, and his mother ran in. With one hand she 
grabbed an arrow on the ground. With the other hand 
she grabbed the arrow sticking in the bear. They killed 
the bear.” 

“Yes,” said Nanook, ‘“‘on the island straight out from 
Cape Wolstenholme the kablunak’s big ship that hunts 
whales struck a reef [the Captain Grant disaster, during the 
fall of 1911]. When the ship struck the reef the kablunak 
told the Eskimos who were aboard to go ashore. Then the 
storm came. ‘The ship and the thirty kablunak went down. 
The Eskimos became very hungry. They had lost their 
weapons and dogs and kayaks and tents, which sank with 
the ship. But they had the white man’s knife, and casks 
drifted in from the wreck. Out of the wood of the casks, not 
much longer than my arm [measuring] they made bows and 


FILMS 149 


arrows. And it was with these bows and arrows that they 
killed bear and ate meat and made clothing.” 

Bear prospects on the Cape interested us most. All over 
again we talked of the “‘big, big aggie.”” Nanook picked up 
a hunk of snow. With a few simple strokes he carved a 
miniature bear. With it before him he made tracings in the 
snow. “The bear will stick to the cave,” said he, “until we 
open it block by block, for her cubs are very small. [The 
cub at birth is no larger than a rat.] But be careful of the 
’ and 
he wound up with an unintelligible exclamation. Explained 
“Harry Lauder,” the post-trained: “You fall in, bear him 
saucy.” 

We were breaking camp before the sun had cleared the 
horizon. The dogs fought like wolves as they wedged in 
through the door of the igloo we had just vacated; the crew 
tried vainly by grasping legs and tails to drag them out for 
harnessing; Nanook, his arms around the master dog, carried 
him bodily to the sledge. J unlimbered the Akeley, hoping 
to get a few feet of itallonfilm. But, to my dismay, as soon 
as I started grinding, so brittle was the film that it broke into 
bits, like so much wafer glass. The thermometer read thirty- 
seven degrees below. We were up against it, since thirty- 


cave,” said Nanook. “The roof is thin, not strong,’ 


seven below and more would be common in the weeks to 
come. Clearly, unless some remedy were found, it would be 
useless to keep on. 

We went back into camp. By keeping the film retorts in 
the igloo I found that within the hour they took on its tem- 
perature. The film regained its ductility. I told off Na- 
nook to bury the film retorts and camera in his deerskin robe 


150 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


henceforth when we broke camp in the morning. The crew 
were convulsed over what they called “the babies’”’ for 
which he had to care. 

Through the next three days we strained our eyes for an- 
other sight of the Cape, but drift filled the air. Even the 
coastline, never more than six to ten miles off in the east, we 
glimpsed only occasionally, and then so faintly that Nanook 
could only guess at where we were. 

The first of February broke with a drifter. All day we 
toiled slowly on through big, rough ice. But by sundown 
we made a landfall, and the toil and care of heavy sledging 
were forgotten. Nanook pointed to a patch, faint, far-off, 
through the birl of snow. He was sure it was the Cape. 
There was a shift in the wind and momentarily the drift 
thinned out; but the patch was nothing but a small island no 
more than a mile away. ‘‘The Cape gets farther away,” 
complained the crew. 

A luckless, glum camp was our igloo that night. Nanook’s 
strong dog had been crippled in the rough ice. To-morrow 
the dog food would be at an end. What food remained for 
Nanook and his crew was a share of mine—poor substitute 
for seal. There were no stories about the Cape, and as to 
where we were Nanook refused to answer. 

All through the next day Nanook and the crew walked far 
out on the sea ice, hunting seal. When evening came I 
watched the black specks of them return. “No seals,” said 
Nanook, as he crawled through the snow tunnel into camp; 
“and,” he went on to relate, shaking the snow dust from his 
furs, ‘I waited over one hole all day.”’ I told him it was not 
the kind of hunting I should care to do. Said he, “I have 


FILMS 151 


waited three days for a seal. And,” he concluded simply, 
“the seal never came. But wait till we get to the Cape,” 
hopefully he went on. ‘“‘Nowhere can one find a better place 
for seal. There never was such hunting ground.” 

For two days snow smoke filled the air. Then the wind 
broke. By igloo time the gray pall which so long had over- 
spread the sky gave way to a glowing ground of blue. We 
climbed a near-by mound of ice. From the big disk of sun, 
half-sunken in the sea, we watched a flood of amber creep 
over the wilderness of ice and snow, over spires and pinnacles, 
the emeralds of miles and miles of rough icefields. Banks of 
mists hung like curtains in the north. ‘Behind them,” said 
Nanook, “‘lies the Cape.” But of the Cape there was no 
sign. ‘The sun’s upper rim was almost level with the sea. 
We were turning toward camp, when slowly the searchlight 
from the sun lifted up. The mists caught fire. Through 
their red and salmon embers broke the gigantic head and 
shoulders of the Cape. 

Night gloom was down in a moment more; the Cape was 
wrapped in cloud. Nothing remained but a splash of copper 
where the sun had fallen into the sea. 

Again came three drift-swept days. Wesaw no land save 
near-by islands and occasionally a black thread of coast. 
More slowly we travelled, for the dogs were weak. There 
were fruitless hunts for seal. The evenings were all the 
same—mending and keeping gear in repair, and Nanook’s 
tales. One night he told us how he and his mother (he was 
a boy then) were travelling through the interior with a band 
of Eskimos. Two of them died of starvation; he himself was 
badly frozen. He said dogs were good eating; he with the 


152 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


others ate them then. ‘Harry Lauder”’ told me too that 
dogs were good eating; he told us that one winter they had 
nothing to eat for a long time but dogs. For a month they 
had no light for their igloos. 

The fourth day was clear. Again there were sundogs, and 
the coast hung miraged in the stark sky. But notwithstand- 
ing, Nanook told us he had found a landmark. It was Mos- 
quito Bay, and the Cape was near—not more than two days 
away. But even by noon we found no bay to cross. Our 
faces fell; Nanook bowed his head and steadfastly refused to 
look upon the confounding mirage again. 

Whenever we crossed cracks or fissures in the ice Nanook 
scanned them for signs of seal. Some he followed far afield, 
only to spend an hour’s hard running to catch up with us 
again. We looked anxiously for the Cape, but everywhere 
in the north were nothing but ponderous banks of clouds. 
As evening drew near, Nanook said that we were near the 
mouth of Mosquito Bay, and pointed to a speck of hill which 
broke the thin low line of coast. We turned in, cheerful over 
the prospect of crossing it on the morrow. The crew were 
filled with jokes and chatter about bear and seal and foxes 
that were waiting for them on the Cape. 

We were off at daybreak next day. But the long hours 
dragged one by one, and still no sign of the landmark we had 
been looking for so long. Nanook, ashamed to join us at 
the sledge, was a black dot on the ice ahead. Every little 
way we stopped to rest the dogs; the poor brutes were starv- 
ing; Tooktoo, our big brown leader, was too weak to carry 
on. We lashed him on the sledge. To keep them from 
freezing, one of us now and then rubbed his feet. 


FILMS 153 


The twenty-second day. Again we carried the brown dog 
on the sledge. His groans troubled the team, who would 
halt and turn their heads toward him. We took. turns at 
putting our shoulders to the sledge, for the team could barely 
keep it moving. When we halted to rest them and untangle 
traces Nanook, pointing to Tooktoo, said he was dying. He 
killed him with a bear spear. I suggested we might take the 
carcass to use as dog food; but Nanook, holding it aloft, said 
it was a skeleton. So we left poor old Tooktoo, a brown 
patch lying on the snow. 

Again we took turns at putting our shoulders to the sledge. 
We saw nothing of the coast, so thick was the drive of snow. 
Slowly the day dragged on. Nanook talked to, urged, and 
cajoled the broken team. Glumly enough we were debating 
whether it would not be wise to stop, igloo for the night, and 
rest up the team; when Nanook pointed with his harpoon to 
a break in the sky ahead. High up from where the line of 
coast should be loomed a patch of gray and black, guttered 
by ravines of snow. 

“The Cape!” he called. Then the sun flooded everything, 
and everywhere the shroud before us fell away; and a gigan- 
tic flank, wrinkled, seamed and scarred, rose for a thousand 
feet until it touched the sky. 

Every dog knew we were near the journey’s end. Not for 
days had our lump of sledge moved so fast. The night was 
down, but within the hour we were on the ice foot of the Cape 
cutting an igloo in the snow. I fell asleep to the drone of 
Nanook’s voice, running over plans for the great seal hunt in 
the morning. 

When I wakened, though daylight was still an hour away, 


154 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


Nanook, by fitful candlelight, was going over his spears and 
harpoons. He smacked his lips when he talked of seal. 
Where we were camped the rough sea ice, jammed high 
against the shoreline of the Cape, prevented our seeing the 
sea. So, with our hearts in our mouths, we climbed a rise 
for a sight of Nanook’s great hunting ground. For some time 
we strained our eyes out over that white waste before we 
realized that nowhere was there an open lane or dot of tidal 
pool, but everywhere it was unbroken—solid ice, jammed 
in by the wind and as barren as the desert over which we had 
come. 

From my diary: 

Wednesday, February Sth—Gale all through the night. 
Its roar resounds despite thick igloo walls. Nanook went 
out at daybreak; returned in half an hour. ‘‘Too much 
wind,” said he. Saw tracks of four bear which must have 
crossed ice foot within sight of igloo some time during night. 
Our dogs either failed to smell them or were too weak to 
sound alarm. Indoorsallday. Constantly comes the boom 
and thunder of the icefields as they jam and raft high along 
the coast. 

Thursday.—Gale subsides. Myself not very fit. In 
igloo all day. When among the icefields sealing Nanook 
kills one, but very small. So hungry they couldn’t wait to 
carry it to igloo for flensing, but gorged on it where it lay. 
When Nanook came.crawling through the igloo dragging 
what remained of the carcass he had a battle royal with the 
dogs. 

Through the evening Nanook talked of ice; of how he and 
his two hunting companions were nearly caught on the ice 


DLO nA Te Wo Lao: Wel SNe 
TESTA Uevi ee he CONGVaed so Telarc vseials A Oo deka aveN: elbsmmeel ee 











SA a ein RIES ee Sah pentane 








FILMS Tes 


pack which drove out to sea. “Where it happened is not a 
half-day’s sledging from this igloo. We were out on the 
rough ice after bear. We had made a kill and were on our 
way in to land, when we came upon a lane of open water 
which stood between us and the ice foot of the Cape. Far 
off in the distance the lane narrowed. We dropped our kill 
and made off as fast as we could travel, but nowhere was the 
lane narrow enough to leap. Just in time we spied an ice 
pan. It was about the length of a sledge. With the ice 
pan for boat, our harpoons for paddles, we paddled across.” 

Then each of the crew told of some misadventure he had 
had at some time or other on the ice. “Harry Lauder,” 
with his father and mother, the mother carrying a babe in 
arms, were adrift all through one moon off the Gulf Hazard 
coast. When the west winds packed the icefield in to the 
mainland where they landed was Cape Dufferin, two hun- 
dred and fifty miles north of Gulf Hazard. The winter was 
almost done before they saw home again. 

“IT remember Comock of Kovik, just north of here,” said 
Nanook. ‘‘Comock and three men, wives, and children 
were out on the ice. The ice broke while they slept. Two 
of the men, a woman, and three children drifted off one way 
and Comock and the rest off the other. The others were 
never seen or heard of again. But Comock and his crowd, 
after days and days adrift, touched land. It was the big 
island far off from Kovik [Mansfield Island, seventy miles 
off the coast]. On this island did Comock and his people 
live. They were very poor. They clothed themselves with 
skins of the bear. Their sinew [thread] they cut from the 
intestines of the salmon. They got very hungry for their 


156 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


old friends and homeland, so one day they put out upon the 
ice as it was parting from the shoreline, hoping that the west 
winds would blow long enough to carry them over to the 
mainland. But for a moon they drifted here and there and 
everywhere, and when they landed it was on an island off 
Cape Wolstenholme. 

“They were very poor,” Nanookrepeated. ‘They lived 
on sea pigeons which they killed with stones. With what 
sealskins they had and what driftwood, walrus bones, and a 
deer horn they found along the shore, they made an omiak. 
But the omiak was not large enough to hold them all, who 
now numbered thirteen men, women, babes, and children. 
So they blew up seal bladders and tied them on the sides of 
their omiak. Comock’s head wife held a long stick in her 
hands so that she might keep the children still. Where they 
reached the mainland was on the straight up-and-down coast 
of Cape Wolstenholme. On the first narrow ledge that they 
could see they landed, for a strong wind was rising. The 
landing was barely big enough to hold their omiaks and 
themselves, but here for two days they had to stay. The 
seas drenched them. When the water was calm again they 
launched their omiak, paddled around the big nose of the 
Cape, and landed in the snug cove on the other side. Old 
friends greeted them when they walked out on shore. They 
must have been glad,” said Nanook in conclusion. 

“How long was it,”’ I asked, “from the time they were 
swept out to sea before they reached their homeland again?”’ 

“Ten summers and ten winters were the number of the 
notches that Comock cut on the handle of his harpoon,” 
Nanook replied. — 7 


FILMS 157 


Friday.—Living gale from southward. Coal-oil almost 
gone. Nanook improvised a seal-oil lamp out of a piece of 
driftwood, fireproofing the wick side with a strip of tin. 
Depend upon it for warmth but it gives a woful amount. 
Nothing to do but keep in sleeping-bag and huddle from the 
cold and listen to the bitter wind as it pipes above the hiss of 


driving snow about the igloo dome. Shadows show, through 


the snow walls, of great clouds of drift as they go birling by. 
 Saturday.—Sleepless, I listened all night for a let-up to the 
wail of wind. Dawn was still, but crawling out-of-doors 
everything was blanketed with rime and heavy snow. With- 


in the hour the wind whipped around to the north and was 


blowing another gale. Again no sealing. Our igloo was 
much begrimed. The heap of picked bones in the lamp cor- 
ner was a sight. Nanook with his snow knife scraped away 
the litter; as he brushed it out through the door the dogs 
turned the place into pandemonium with their fighting. We 
had to club hard to prevent them forcing an entrance. 
Later during the day the dogs ate up some of our precious 
seal line and a sealskin bow-and-arrow case which we had 
cached—out of harm’s way, we supposed—on top the igloo 
dome. 

Overnight the gale subsided. We broke camp and put 
out along the Cape’s north flank. Within the mile we 
sighted a white fox jumping wildly to get free of a trap 
Nanook had set the day before. The fox was no sooner 
killed and the sledge started again than Nanook, squatted 
on the sledgeload, skinned the fox and shared with the men 
rare tidbits of the still-warm flesh. Blood drops fell on the 
trail, and on his bootlegs were great red splotches. When I 


TRO MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


remarked that they must be very hungry, said Nanook, “We 
have had no food.” Jremonstrated. Said he, only enough 
remained for me, and he added, “‘ From now on there will be 
no sharing.’ Iglooed on the ice foot. Igloo very cold. 
My cold feet prevented sleep, but Nanook, crawling over, 
took off his kooletah, placed them on his stomach, put them 
under the pits of his arms and rubbed them until they were 
warm through and through. © 

Monday.—At dark men returned. They saw the tracks of 
eight bear through various hours of the day, all of them going 
far out to sea on their hunt for seal. Nanook returned late. 
How we waited to hear above the din of dog howling some 
word of bear caves! But there were many gulps of food and 
sips of tea before he gave us any news. Saw many, many 
signs, but no caves. The bear are far out on the ice edge at 
sea, he thinks. He fears snow is too heavily drifted by re- 
cent gales and dens may be impossible to find. ‘Harry 
Lauder,” for the last two days sulking, now tries to regain 
my good-will—on the alert to cut my tobacco, overhaul my 
boots and dogskin mitts, and keep my sleeping bag, which 
is as stiff as so much tin, limber and clear of rime and snow. 

Tuesday.—Cheerless day. Very cold west wind. Met 
many bear tracks as we travelled. Nowhere a sign of open 
water. We came upon a flock of ducks wheeling over the 
rough ice. The sight filled me with elation, for I felt sure 
that open water must be near. But Nanook was grim and 
silent. The ducks were starving—nearly frozen; they 
showed it in the feebleness of their flights. Every drift bank 
in the chaos of seamed and ribbed lava which makes up the 
Cape’s tremendous flank we scanned for signs of bear. By 


FILMS 159 


nightfall we reached the point where the Cape buries its nose 
in a snarl of frozen sea. Nowhere was there a sight of open 
water. 

Wednesday.—The men went off early sealing in the rough 
ice, and Nanook with one of the dogs in leash went up bear- 
cave hunting among the ranges. I dare not go far from the 
igloo, for no matter how securely I block the igloo door the 
dogs start digging at the igloo walls the moment my back is 
turned. The men returned at dark. No seals, but far out 
they saw a narrow lane of open water. 

Thursday—The dogs all in. Whenever I crawl out 
through the tunnel I have to lift them like sacks of flour out 
of my way. During the morning I saw a blue lane of open 
water out in the west. Time and time again I climbed toa 
lookout for a sight of the men, fearful that they might dare 
too much or be swept out to sea. 

Friday, Saturday, Sunday.—Same—no seals. 

Monday.—Same, no seals. No light, no oil for lamp. 
Igloo very cold. Morning and night three candles under an 
old lard pail thawed out my hunks of frozen beans. 

Tuesday.—Nanook broke open the snow-block door his 
face all smiles. No wonder: he shoved forward a small seal. 
But his smile was more than a small seal smile. An ogjuk 
—big—longer than the spread of his arms—lay out in a safe 
cache on the ice. Everywhere the sea ice was opening, he 
said. Signs of bear were everywhere—yes, and not a har- 
poon’s throw from the igloo they picked out the trail of a big 
one that not long before had passed by. (Probably I was 
asleep.) Whatanight! The dogs’ bellies full, Nanook and 
the crew almost drunk with feasting—chunks and chunks 


160 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


and chunks of meat. Grunted like walruses when they 
turned in. 

W ednesday.—Never have any of our igloos been so warm. 
From the hoar-frosted prostrate forms of the men rise 
streams of vapour. So much for the body heat that comes 


from raw seal-meat eating. 


V 


ITHIN a week the dogs were on their feet again, 
\ ) : | and we struck off with a groaning sledgeload of red 
seal meat back along our old trail along the ice 
foot of the Cape. Less than half way Nanook, halting 
the team, pointed up to where the crest of the Cape, like the 
wrinkled foil of silver, stood out against the sky. Over 
the crest, he continued, the Eskimos used to portage to the ice 
foot on the southern flank. We could save a long journey 
by climbing it, and what was more, we would be in the bear- 
den country the while. He hoped I wouldn’t mind the climb. 
We would have to get in harness with the dogs and go at it 
in easy stages, just a little sledge load at a time—and he pan- 
tomimed the operation with his snow knife in the snow. 
We see-sawed over the ice foot into land and struck up 
the Cape’s big slope. But sometimes the twelve tigerish 
dogs and we four, bent half way to the ground, could only 
move the sledge by feet and inches. And there were drift 
banks into which the sledge jammed its nose and died. Leap 
after leap of the team and our “‘heave’s”’ and “‘ho’s”’ failed 
to dislodge it; we had to give back some precious feet, with 
snow knives smooth out the trail, and start again. The 
leaps and lunges of the team soon played them; each dog 
would blame his neighbour for their common plight, and 
forthwith fight to kill. Nanook’s long whip, spitting terror 


amongst them, and the crew and I, pulling on traces, were 
| 161 


162 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS _ 


the only means of preventing death there and then. Finally 
cowed, they gasped at full length on the snow and we must 
wait long minutes until they got their wind again. 

Whirlpools of drift, spinning down the slope, plastered 
us. By the time we reached the crest the wind was running 
wild. Nanook went off to locate igloo snow. I crouched 
behind the bulwark of the sledge and watched the towers and 
spirals and jets of drift bound from ledge to ledge, from slope 
to slope down to the ice foot, a white hair-line nine hundred 
feet below; the milky shreds and strings which were snow 
smoke, dragging over the illimitable fields of ice, over the 
sapphire which was sea, and on into the vague west where 
they were drowning the big orange of sun. 

Never did Nanook’s spiral of snow blocks build up so 
slowly. Before the first tier was up I crouched behind it and 
Nanook with his snow knife cut off a hunk of snow and tried 
to rub out the white of my frozen cheeks and nose. By 
the time the last block was set, black night was down. 
Nanook and the crew fed the dogs, coiled the harnesses, and 
sealed up the igloo’s door. I had camp all made. The moss 
wick of the seal-oil lamp was sending off heart-warming little 
tongues of flame; hunks of snow in the pot above it were 
melted and warming up for scalding draughts of tea. Fro- 
zen seal meat and my beans were thawing; the willow mats 
were down, and the sleeping bags lay unrolled on the igloo’s 
floor of snow. When Nanook had thawed out his frozen 
white nose and whiter cheeks and rubbed them red again, 
said he, his arms sweeping round the sparkling white dome 
which sheltered us: “‘Oh, surely no igloo of the kablunak is so 
wonderful!”’ 


FILMS 163 


*““Amen,” said I. 

For six days we hunted for bear dens among the pot holes 
along the talus slopes and through the deep ravines of the 
Cape’s south flank. But even Nanook had to give in, for 
recent gales and heavy drifts made success impossible. 
“Had we more time,” he pleaded, ““even two weeks more, 
surely we would findaden.”’ But there was still the bulk of 
the winter’s filming to be done down at the base, and the 
margin of time to do it in, even if we returned in record 
time, would be very small. 

At daybreak we struck out for home—the team a-gallop, or 
overrun by the coasting sledge dragging in their harnesses 
through the snow. In two hours we were across the ice foot 
and striking south across the frozen sea. 

Day followed day—yellow suns and cloudless skies. The 
snow in those long slants of ethereal light was as glowing as 
so much satin, in folds upon the land and a blanket upon the 
sea. Sundogs—smudges of brass and ochre—hung for 
hours in the blue enamel of the sky. 

Within ten days we reached the abandoned igloos of the 
trip going north, and home, said Nanook, smiling from ear 
to ear, was only three days off. But overnight came an- 
other drifter. For five days we crawled. The dogs’ seal 
meat was finished; for Nanook and the crew there was little 
left but bones; my beans were down to crumbs; and home, 
with the going as it was, was still days away. 

We were travelling along the lowest of the coast—so low 
that oftentimes we hardly knew whether we were on land or 
sea. Said Nanook: “The cache of oil we laid on the up 
trip is still two days farther on, but some time to-day we 


164 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


should see the stump of driftwood which I found the day we 
reached the abandoned igloos. I left it up-ended in the 
snow—we'll get some red heat to-night if we find it.” But 
though we hugged the coast that precious fuel, the only drift- 
wood we found on all its two hundred miles, we never saw 
again. When night came, cross bars from the sledge and four 
two-hundred-foot rolls of film was the makeshift that boiled 
our tea. 

For the next three days what food sustained the team was 
the igloo’s scraps and crumbs. More rolls of film and splin- 
ters from the sledge made up our fuel. When we broke 
camp on the fourth morning the sky was clear; the wind was 
strong. The snow was packing hard. Said Nanook: ‘If 
we strip the sledge of its load, of the cameras, of the sleeping- 
bags and all, we’ll see home by nightfall.’’ So we left every- 
thing within the igloo, sealed up the snow block of door, and 
struck out for home. Nanook kept far out in the lead, and 
ever when the team slowed down he pretended to be spear- 
ing, or lying down with his arms and legs imitated the flip- 
pers of a basking seal. The team, weak though they were, 
never made such speed. 

_ But when night came on there was no sign of the river’s 
mouth or the post’s cabin lights. The darkness thickened; 
we stumbled over ridges and drifts of snow. Nanook called 
out from the gloom ahead to halt and wait while he scouted 
for a course to follow through the hills ahead. Turning the 
sledge up on one runner we crouched behind it. An hour or 
more Nanook was gone. When he returned said he: ‘‘ There 
is not light enough to see. Nothing to do but igloo till day- 
light comes.”” But Nanook and the crew had hardly un- 


FILMS 166 


sheathed their knives when the wavering bands of the aurora 
began gathering in the north, and light as bright as moon- 
light lit up the snow. We swung off through a valley among 
the hills. Streamers like the fringes of titanic curtains hung 
over us, sometimes so low that even Nanook reached out 
his hand as if to feel them. For I do not know how many 
minutes, they swayed and swung, then more gentle became 
their undulations—their glow was dying. We had begun to 
believe the festival was over, when, like the lash of whips un- 
coiling, they broke out—maelstroms! wheels! whirlpools! 
lavender! cream! and apple-green! The light they shed, a 
cast of green, drenched the humble hills and slopes of snow. 
““Kapay!”’ exclaimed Nanook. ‘“‘Kapay!’’ echoed the crew. 

The baying of a pack of wolves brought us to our senses. 
The wolves were the dog army of the post. 

““What—no bear!” said Stewart, the post trader, who 
with his interpreter came stamping into my cabin to welcome 
Nanook and me and get news of the trip. “‘What,” he re- 
peated, “six hundred miles of travellin’, eight weeks away 
an’ no bear!”’ 

“Too bad, too bad,” he muttered, “‘an’ just to think that 
a week come Friday two huskies got a she-bear an’ two cubs 
inacave. ”ITwould have made a fine aggie, they said, what 
with the fightin’ an’ all—throwin’ the dogs through the air 
an’ chargin’ here an’ chargin’ there; an’,” he continued, 
rubbing it in, “all this less’n a day away!” 


VI 


until the last week in May that two lone honking 
geese flying low over the post brought the natives 
running from their tents exclaiming ‘“‘Awyung [spring] is 
here!” By the end of June all the snow, save deep drifts in 
ravines and along the slopes of hills, was gone. Arctic 


G ests in the north is long in coming. It was not 


flowers, solid masses of purple, white, and yellow, sprang up 
through the tawn and russet mosses of the plains. Flock 
upon flock of geese like regiments came sailing through the 
sky, and coveys of ptarmigan hovered near the post and even 
perched upon the houses. Arctic salmon, burnished steel 
and silver, teemed in the mouths of the streams that tumbled 
into the sea, and among the islands lying off the coast were 
swarms of nesting sea pigeons and eiders. Every kayak that 
came paddling in was loaded, decks over, with scores of 
geese, salmon, eiders, and dozens of eggs for trade. The sun 
went down about ten and rose again about three; it did not 
go far below the blue line of northern hills, and the glow of it 
shot constantly up the sky, splashing colour on each cloud 
bank that sailed by. Everyone now slept when he willed; 
the voices of some rioting group of youngsters were always 
in the air. 

Nanook was restless; the wanderlust again was upon him. 
He knew, he said one day when we were making the whale- 


boat ready for sea, where there were many white whales. 
166 


FILMS 167 


They played in a little bottle-necked harbour some three 
days’ kayaking up the coast. We might, he continued hope- 
fully, get the “big aggie”’ there. 

Icefields still lay along the coast, the blue-green ribbons of 
water lanes amongst them ever changing with the working 
of the winds and tide. Came a driving nor’easter herding 
the floes to sea, and before the day was ended all that re- 
mained was a thin white line far out in the west. 

Wild fowl in multitudes we encountered on the way. 
Under the leaning brows of cliffs that rose three hundred feet 
_ in air were strata of sea gulls and clouds of sea pigeons and 
big eiders. A weird medley were their wild cries and screams 
the reéchoing of our guns and the deep booming of the 
sea. 

Where we landed for sea-pigeon eggs the sea pigeons 
swarmed like flies hardly an arm’s length above us. As 
they came breast on, Nanook would hurl a piece of driftwood 
into them, bringing down three or four birds with a single 
throw. 

With a gale from the west the icefields again came in, and, 
rafting high along the rock masses of the coast, kept us pris- 
oners. We went inland, goose-hunting among the tundra’s 
tiny ponds. The geese, having shed their wing feathers, 
were unable to fly. Over the spongy tundra they scattered 
here and there and everywhere. Only the young men had 
wind enough to run them down. 

For two days we worked through every winding lane that 
opened with the tides, or hauled the boat up on to the floes 
as the lanes closed in again, until a providential offshore 
wind finally freed us and we bowled in to a bare rock strip of 


168 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


point which proved to be Nanook’s “Culelulewak noona”’ 
(the white whale land). 

We dared not camp too near the bottle-necked entrance 
to the whale ground, for even from a mile away the banging 
of an oar against a gunwale might frighten the whales and 
drive them out to sea. We camped under the lee of a cliff a 
mile and a half distant, and upon its crest the men took turns 
as lookout. It was two weeks to a day when a school of 
some twenty, all told, came swinging in from sea. Nanook, 
leading the fleet of kayakers, slowly paddled toward the 
harbour’s mouth. “Harry Lauder,” carrying the Akeley 
camera, and myself with the hand camera and film retorts 
walked overland to the harbour head. We were hardly 
more than half way over when the lookout signalled that the 
whales were in. The kayakers at their fastest speed raced 
for the entrance, and side by side with paddles beating gun- 
wales and all the shouts and yells their lungs could stand 
came slowly in. .. The deafening din threw the quarry into a 
panic. The whales’ ear drums, Nanook had explained, are 
so sensitive that sound not only frightens but hurts them. 
Their snow-white bodies flashed in the sun as they came up 
to blow or to rush around the small loop of the harbour’s end, 
only to meet the barriers of land. Time after time they 
tried to break through the kayak’s cordon, only to be driven 
back again or harpooned if ‘they came too near. For an 
hour the fight kept on, until five were harpooned. With 
their kayaks hitched in line, Nanook and his companions 
spent the remainder of the day towing in the kill and hauling 
them out on shore. Two days were consumed in cutting up 
and apportioning it. With the whaleboat full of meat which 


FILMS “6G 


Nanook was taking as presents to his people at the post, we 
left for the south, all the Gites of film I carried exposed on 
Nanook’s last “big aggie.”’ 


When August came Stewart, the trader, and I began 
speculating as to when the once-a-year little schooner, with 
its precious mail from home and news of the busy world, 
would come. We thumbed through the post diaries for 
dates of past arrivals and, averaging them up, made bets. 
A lookout was almost constantly on the hills, for a sack of 
sea biscuit was the prize for him who first should see her sails. 

To poor old Nanook the world seemed empty. He hung 
about my cabin, talking over films we still could make if I 
would only stay on for another year. He never quite under- 
stood why I should have gone to all the fuss and pother of 
making the “big aggie” of him—the hunting, yes—but 
surely everyone knew the Eskimo, and could anything possi- 
bly be more common than dogs and sledges and snow houses? 
I tried to give him an idea of the big igloos the kablunak had 
for showing films. To him, the hundred and fifty of his 
fellow men, as many more at Great Whale, in the distant 
south, and at far-off Fort Chimo, and at Cape Wolstenholme, 
were practically the population of the world. The kablu- 
nak’s movie igloo, into which thousands came, was utterly 
beyond his comprehension. ‘They were many, I used to say, 
like the little stones along the shore. “‘And will all these 
kablunaks see our ‘big aggie’?’’ he would ask. There was 
never need to answer, for incredulity was written large upon 
his face. 

At last came the signal from the lookout on the hill. 


170 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS 


Within two days I was aboard and the Aynie’s nose was 
headed south. Nanook followed in his kayak, until the 
Annie, gathering speed, gradually drew away. I saw him 
turn, still waving, toward his topek, which stood out from 
the low, melancholy waste of shore—all that he called home! 

Less than two years later, I received word by the once-a- 
year mail that comes out of the north that Nanook was dead. 
Poor old Nanook! Our “big aggie,”’ become “Nanook of 
the North,” has gone into most of the odd corners of the 
world—into the desert of the Sahara, India, Burma, Siam, 
where audiences must be told that white means snow; and 
more kablunaks than there are stones around the shore of 
Nanook’s home have looked upon Nanook, the kindly, the 
brave, the simple Eskimo. 


THE END 





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